


baby teeth

by pretenses



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: ...ish, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, First Kiss, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, I'll add more tags as I think of them, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kinda, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Slow Burn, beverly is so intuitive and i love her? what about it., gotta love these bitches, some blood mentions and stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-08-14 10:16:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16490681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pretenses/pseuds/pretenses
Summary: It was that same summer Eddie had recognized what love was supposed to feel like, what it was supposed to do. Because for his friends, he’d felt an overwhelming amount. For Richie, he’d felt even more than that. Still feels. But the ache that comes with that knowledge is an entirely different sensation. Even now.





	1. beginning

Eddie Kaspbrak stands in the center of the sidewalk, gripping a halfway-crumpled paper in between his shaky fingers like a lifesource, mouth agape and watery eyes wide. He must look like a crazy person. He hugs the paper to his chest in a tight embrace, rips it away to stare at it again, then tucks it safely back into the confines of the fat envelope it came in.  

An unshakeable grin on his face unlike any other that has graced his lips in years, Eddie skips towards his house and squeals the second he shuts the door behind him, sinking to the ground and staring at the envelope like it’s just offered him a million fucking dollars. And hasn’t it? A ticket out of Derry is enough to send any resident into a frenzy. Fighting back the hot tears of happiness that spring to his eyes proves to be difficult, but Eddie manages, blinking them away when his mother arises from her room down the hall still dressed in her robe.  

“Eddie?” she says, furrowing her brow as she eyes him. Normally she doesn’t wake up for another hour or two despite it being well on its way to lunchtime. Not that Eddie has ever minded the ease with which he can slip out of the house on a daily basis. “Why are you sitting on the floor, Eddie? It’s filthy.”

Only half listening, Eddie replies, “It’s not, I mopped it yesterday.” His thumbnail traces the brim of the future he holds in his hand. “I’m going to college.” He regrets announcing it immediately when his mother’s face falls.

Sonia pauses, gawks at her son. “Eddie, I thought we discussed that.” She wobbles over to the coffee pot - Eddie is forbidden from drinking coffee in the house because it’ll poison his brain and encourage a caffeine addiction (which apparently is worse than heroin, according to his mother, because of the nuanced way it morphs into a daily habit). Technically he’s forbidden from drinking coffee outside of the house as well. That means next to nothing to him, though. 

“We didn’t,” he says slowly. He feels like a child all curled up on the floor so he stands and brushes off the seat of his shorts. 

His mother has her back to him, as she so often does whenever they get into a scuffle of any sort. She won’t look at him until she’s mustered up a few tears and forced them out of her eyes. Eddie makes a promise to himself right then and there that this time, be it the first time, he won’t fall for it. He’s worked too hard and busted his ass nonstop for four painstaking years of high school to give it up now because his mother had turned on the waterworks. 

“I could’ve sworn we did. You can’t _go_ ,” she says. “You can’t just _leave._ I’m getting older. I need you to take care of me.”  

“I’ve taken care of you for thirteen years. I’ve taken care of you since dad died.”

“And you’ve done such a good job.” Of course he has. He hasn’t had any option but to do a fantastic job at running errands and staying quiet and doing as he’s told (or as far as she knows, anyway). 

Eddie sighs. Anger bubbles in his chest. He slaps the envelope onto the kitchen table, staring at it with a deep longing, driving himself forward as he speaks. “Ma, you know that I love you,” he says, a routine mantra he’s gone through a million and one times to soothe her tightly wound nerves. “But.”

The dreaded  _ but _ sends Sonia swirling around, eyebrows arched. She leans against the counter and taps her nubby fingernail against the porcelain mug in her thick fingers, expectant, waiting. Eddie tears his eyes reluctantly away from his ticket out of this horrendous house and looks to his mother with a steadfast glare. “But,” he repeats, “I have to go. I can’t just… you can’t just pretend like I’m going to be twelve forever.”

There’s a pregnant pause that stretches for an eternity. “You’re always gonna be my baby, Eddie,” his mother says softly, resolutely. Like Eddie is just meant to accept that.

The tension in the room is palpable, impossible to ignore and heavy like the humidity in the spring air outside. Eddie crosses his arms and lifts his chin, feeling ridiculous. Though he’s sure he’s in the right in this moment, he isn’t sure there will ever be a moment where being under his mother’s scrutinizing gaze won’t make him feel like a toddler. “No,” he says, finally spitting it out. Years and years, he’s been wanting to say it, but the words had never come. “I’m not. I haven’t been your baby. I’m not a baby.”

Sonia’s entire stance changes. “Well, stop acting like one and listen to your mother, then,” she says. Certainly she hopes it will dismiss him and his rebuttals. It does, in some ways - he rolls his eyes, grabs the envelope and tucks it safely in the top shelf of his closet all the way in the back corner before coming back down the stairs and fleeing the house without another word. The whole way to whatever destination he might end up at, he mumbles to himself all the things he wishes he would’ve spat at her on his exit. All the things he wishes he would’ve said when he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen…

Of course she’d want him to still be stuck in his twelve-year-old self’s mindset. Little sixth grade Eddie hadn’t a clue about anything and clung to an aspirator like it would save him from an impending apocalypse if need be. A massive chunk of his childhood had been spent with his legs swinging from the plastic chair in front of Mr. Keene’s counter, waiting for medications he didn’t need or want but had been convinced he was dependent on. All that time could’ve been spent with his friends - the friends his mother hated, the ones he loved.

Loves. Eddie loves them.

The only thing that hadn’t made him lose his mind the second he saw his mother after Mr. Keene had thankfully delivered the earth-shattering news to him about his medication was that his friends had been at the quarry that day. He’d rode his bike out to meet with them in a successful attempt at pissing his mother off and flung every prescription he’d picked up that day into the flat, black water below. Richie had put a hand in between Eddie’s shoulder blades and, in a silent gesture of friendship, rubbed his thumb up and down slowly while Eddie cried (and felt guilty about crying, too. First he’s ruining their fun with a constant spew of medical bullshit and now he’s sobbing when they’d just wanted to swim).

It was that same summer Eddie had recognized what love was  _ supposed _ to feel like, what it was  _ supposed _ to do. Because for his friends, he’d felt an overwhelming amount. For Richie, he’d felt even more than that. Still feels. But the ache that comes with that knowledge is an entirely different sensation. Even now.

The weight of his phone in his pocket becomes apparent to Eddie when it buzzes six times in a row. He fumbles for it, turning it on to be welcomed by several texts from Richie.

**rich:** _ r u comign to bill’s _

**rich:** _ comng _

**rich:** _ coming _

**rich:** _ i’m literally not drunk i promise _

**rich:** _ i just can’t type _

**rich:** _ it’s a talent really _

Eddie grins down at the screen, shaking his head, all thoughts of his mother’s cruelties that had been plaguing him dissipating. Instead, he feels his heartbeat speed up a little, his own personal thunder in his ears. He glances up and is pleased to see he’s only about a block away from Bill’s house. 

_ i totally forgot we were hanging today omg. but ya i’ll be there in 10 _

Richie’s reply comes instantly.

  **rich:** _yay u better look sexy or i’ll be disappointed_

Eddie is happy he’s alone at the present moment. The blush that rises to his cheeks is too embarrassing to even consider explaining to anyone… especially Richie. 

And sexy, really? Had Eddie ever looked sexy once in his eighteen years of life? Unlikely. His shorts - plain and boring tan ones that he’d picked up from a store in the mall - are hardly anything to rave about. Not to mention that Richie’s one to talk.

He crosses the street and picks up his pace, thrilled to be anywhere but home when he finally rounds the corner onto Bill’s street, the well-kept front lawn and the crisp white trim around the windows and door of his home making it distinguishable from the more run-down parts of Derry. Eddie laughs to himself. The more run-down parts? More like the majority of the town. Bill’s neighbourhood is nicer than Eddie’s - and ten times nicer than Beverly’s for  _ sure _ , but not half as nice as Richie’s - and situated a comfortable distance from everywhere one might need to go in a pinch. A convenience store around the corner, a grocery store two streets down, and all his best friends in the world just a five minute drive in any direction. One of the many reasons Eddie admires Bill Denbrough, though, is that he doesn’t really give a fuck about anything but the latter. 

Eddie enters the house without knocking, offering a tight-lipped smile to Bill’s parents and baby brother, Georgie. Georgie doesn’t look up from the furious tapping of his fingers against a controller, eyes glued to the living room television, but he does allow for a distracted, “Hey, Eddie.” Eddie nods towards him before he heads up the stairs.

Bill’s room is at the end of the hallway, the door only cracked open a fraction of an inch until it’s yanked open once Eddie reaches the top of the stairs. “I thought I heard somebody coming!” Richie shouts, spreading out his arms in enthusiastic greeting. “Eds, baby! Come give Papa a kiss!”

“Oh, ew,” Eddie says, slipping past Richie with as little skin-on-skin contact as possible as he approaches the door. 

“Nobody loves me,” Richie says, and Eddie spits out something of a laugh in reply. He slams the door shut and turns dramatically, throwing his hands in the air. “Nobody ever shows me any love at all and honestly? I’m kind of sick of it. If anyone could just show me some respect, some admiration, some adoration even, you know, I’d be the happiest guy on Earth.” He points an accusatory finger at an unsuspecting Mike, who lies on Bill’s bed beside Stan with his chin in his palms. “You, especially, Michael. I ask you for one fuckin’ blowjob and what do I get? Shunned. I get shunned.”

“Are you still fucking  _ talking _ ?” Beverly says suddenly, emerging from Bill’s closet with a pair of scissors in her hand. Eddie quirks an eyebrow and Beverly swats the question in his eyes away with the hand that holds the scissors, narrowly missing the top of Bill’s head when she passes by where he’s seated in his desk chair. “Shit, sorry,” she murmurs. 

“Seriously, Richie,” Stan adds. “What’re you even saying?”

“Just making guesses here, but I think he wants us to l-love him,” Bill says. “But I hardly know him. I don’t kn-know about you lot.”

Ben nods as he sips from a water bottle he nurses in his hand. “Yeah,” he agrees. “He followed me here. Threatened to cut off my toes if I didn’t pretend like he was my friend.” Richie drops to the ground, baffled. His mouth falls open in a wide  _ O _ of disbelief. 

“Guys, guys, guys, stop it,” Eddie says. He sinks into a beanbag chair beside Ben, stretching out his hands in a plea for the bag of chips resting on Ben’s other side. Richie perks up confidently, pointing at Eddie like he’s about to thank him for his support before Eddie continues, “This is, like, animal cruelty. You keep it up and you’ll get arrested.”

“Not if nobody calls the cops,” Stan says. Mike laughs. 

Eddie pops a chip into his mouth only to gag immediately after. “Ew. Sour cream, what the fuck?” he mumbles, scraping the taste off of his tongue with his teeth. “That’s a good point, Stanley, but what if Richie himself calls the cops?”

“I thought dogs didn’t have thumbs,” Beverly muses. She sits down in between Stan and Mike and grabs a fistful of Mike’s t-shirt, tugging it towards herself. She begins to snip at loose threads at the hem. 

“I never said he was a dog. Just an animal.”

“Well, what kind?” Mike grins. 

“A fucking Richie, I don’t know, Mike,” Eddie says. He outstretches his leg to poke Richie in the shoulder with the toe of his sneaker only to have Richie grab his foot and hold it there. He uses all his strength to rip Eddie’s shoe off his foot and throw it at the window, which is luckily closed just enough that it ricochets off and falls to the carpet. “Freak.”

 “Only for you, baby,” Richie says, crawling towards Eddie with his tongue stuck out like he’s about to go in and lick a stripe across his skin. Eddie crosses his arms and folds his legs close to himself, kicking off his other shoe. Richie falls flat on his stomach on the carpet. He rolls over on his back to look up at the ceiling. “That’s why he calls me an animal, ladies and gents. I’m nothing if not committed, so an animal in bed must be an animal in life.”

“You’re a fucking virgin,” Beverly says, rising with a few tan threads in her hand that she sprinkles into the tiny garbage pail by the door before padding over to the closet to return the scissors. “Like, a big virgin.”

“Oh, height jokes, too?” Richie exclaims. “Or are you talking about my dick? If it’s the latter, then yes. A  _ big _ virgin. Some might even say a  _ monster  _ virgin. A  _ record-breakingly huge  _ virgin.”

Eddie laughs and kicks Richie in the shoulder with the same foot Richie had snatched the sneaker off of. Richie’s eyes shift to meet his and he grins wide, the toothiest, cheesiest smile that Eddie has ever known. And honestly? Eddie thinks about that smile a lot.

Stan bites down on his thumbnail then pulls it away from his mouth to say, “What animals are, like… really big and also virgins?”

“King Kong,” Ben answers without hesitation. Richie screams with laughter, holding his sides like he might burst with amusement.

The sound and the sight of it, delightful and familiar and strong, brings Eddie further from the consuming weight of his mother’s muted anger. In a brief stint of spite, he hopes she tracks his phone somehow (though he’d deleted the app that she’d secretly installed months prior) and knows he is here with the friends she so despises.  

“Eds,” Richie calls, high cheeks red with exhilarated laughter. He pokes the exposed skin on Eddie’s calf to get his attention. Eddie looks to the boy sprawled out on the floor in front of him. 

“What?”

“Nothing. You just looked grumpy for a second there.”

Eddie smiles. “You make me grumpy.”

“I don’t think I do,” Richie says smugly. Eddie wonders for a moment what the fuck that could mean, but Richie then lifts himself up to lean on his elbows, whipping his mess of dark curls in Bill’s direction as Georgie worms his way into the room. He regularly tries to join in any time the Losers hang out at Bill’s place, but it always ends the same way.

“Get the f-fuck out, you little germ,” Bill mutters. As fondly as he speaks of his brother when Georgie’s not around, nobody would ever want their kid sibling sitting in on even the most innocent of conversations with their inner circle. And the fact that Georgie had snitched on Bill for calling somebody a cunt when they were all fifteen and Georgie was still just eleven is something Bill might never let go of. He hadn’t been allowed to touch his phone for three weeks.

“Dude, come  _ on, _ ” Georgie groans. He tries to wiggle past Bill, but his devotion to the school’s varsity baseball team is certainly on his side when he steps from side to side, agile as he predicts Georgie’s next move before he even comes up with it.

Beverly snorts. She sits back down in between Mike and Stan, pulling Stan’s head into her lap so she can rake her fingers through his curls, which are tamer than Richie’s but not by a wide margin. Stan obliges without complaint.

“We go to the same school now. I see you guys around all the _time_ ,” Georgie says. 

“Honestly, Georgie, we just won’t want you around because then Bill will figure out we like you better than him,” Mike stage-whispers, cupping his hand by his mouth to shield his lips from Bill. Stan claps his hands together when he laughs at this, throwing his head a little further back onto Beverly’s legs.

Bill sends a sarcastic smile in Mike’s direction before shoving Georgie far enough out the door that he can shut it completely. “Very funny. He’ll m-m-make you play some RPG shooter shit if you keep telling him you like him, and I won’t s-stop him from dragging you down there.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Georgie shouts from the opposite side of the door. The sound of his angry footsteps stomping off towards the stairs, sulking, makes Eddie giggle. Georgie’s strange freshman entitlement is something they all like to pretend they hadn’t gone through collectively… Eddie shudders every time he recalls the first day of high school when he and Richie had been brave enough to try and sit with Greta Bowie and her bratty friends because they’d taken the ‘ _ high school is a great big mixing bowl _ ’ analogy a little too seriously. High school’s made up of ten or twelve different mixing bowls, maybe. And the Losers have their own - and Georgie his own, respectively, with his dweeby video game friends. 

“Are we still watching a movie or does dinner and a show involve you slaughtering your little brother, Big Bill?” Richie jokes. “Not that I mind if we don’t. Already have _quite_ the view from this angle ‘cause I can see right up Eddie’s shorts --”  

“Richie, shut the  _ fuck up, _ ” Stan says, and Richie cackles victoriously when Eddie blushes and readjusts his legs, wrapping his arms around his knees and hugging them closer. 

“Yes, we’re s-s-still watching a movie,” Bill answers. “When my punkass brother gets off the  _ stupid f-fucking PlayStation  _ so we can  _ use the TV!”  _ Bill makes sure to scream the end of his sentence, aiming his head towards the door to ensure his voice carries. Georgie’s groan of aggravation is an immediate response, shrill and annoyed. But there’s also the hard clang of the controller hitting the hardwood floor and Georgie’s feet echoing as he comes upstairs again, the sound diverging when he slams his bedroom door shut on the other end of the hall. 

A cheeky, self-satisfied grin teases at the corners of Bill’s mouth as he swings his bedroom door open again. They all rise from their seats and follow him, and the sound of seven pairs of feet clambering down the stairs isn’t a shock to Bill’s mother, who looks up casually from the book in her hands. She stands and slips unnoticed out of the living room, leaving an abundance of space on the couch and two cushioned chairs for the seven of them to flop down, fighting for room on the couch and piling on top of each other the way they always do. And Eddie is happy. 

Until the movie is over and the jig is up and Eddie can’t pretend he lives here anymore. Richie’s arm, which had been stretched out on the back of the couch, his elbow cradling Eddie’s head, is pulled out from behind Eddie when Richie stands up. He cracks his neck. Eddie cringes. “You need a ride home, Eds?” he says. “My car’s out front. I gotta get going anyway.”

Richie doesn’t have to get home, and they both know this. Ever since childhood, Richie hadn’t adhered to any sort of curfew and came and went from his home as he pleased. But nonetheless, Eddie accepts the offer. He runs upstairs to fetch his abandoned sneakers and Richie’s keys, which he had so carelessly left sitting on Bill’s bedside table next to a water bottle. 

Eddie dreads each step closer to the Denbroughs’ door and the car outside, knowing it only brings him closer and closer to his house again. He offers casual goodbyes to the rest of the Losers. They wave and smile in his direction, too absorbed in some heated debate they’d manage to spark up. Something about Star Wars. Eddie ushers Richie out before they get a chance to drag either of them into it.

“I don’t care what they say,” Richie whispers once the door is shut firmly behind the two of them. He checks over his shoulder as if to make sure nobody is eavesdropping. “The original trio? The best. Prequels suck ass but Obi made them okay. And fuck the sequels. Not watching them. Fuck no.”

Richie unlocks his car as he says this, and the two of them climb into the beaten down old minivan. The car is too broken in to even be identified as the slick shiny black it had been when Richie bought it - he’d saved up for years to get his own car, one big enough for all seven of them to fit in. Swears it’s for a road trip someday. Someday has yet to come. 

Eddie laughs as Richie stares at him, clearly refusing to start the car until he gets an agreement. “I don’t know about that, Richie. Anakin was kinda hot, you know?”

“Pfft. You are so shallow. Padmé was hot, too. Doesn’t mean I base my excellent cinematic opinions on how sexy the characters are. You wound me, Eddie. Those movies suck. They suck,” Richie says, mocking a terrible emotional crack in his voice on Eddie’s name. The shit-eating grin on his face gives him away.

“ _ Please, _ ” Eddie groans. “The Star Wars shit… it’s been eight years since you watched those fucking movies. Let it go.”

“I won’t. Not ever.”

 Eddie crosses his arms and huffs. “Whatever.”

 Not that he really minds Richie’s whole obsessive movie thing. It’d been there since they were seven or eight, when Richie would start quoting dozens of films to Eddie and getting offended when Eddie didn’t catch on (usually because his mother had forbidden him from seeing that particular movie because it might put _ideas_ in his head. He always had to watch them behind her back at Richie or Bill’s houses). Eddie doesn’t remember a lot of the movies, though. Mostly he remembers that Richie more often than not had a good chunk of the dialogue memorized, and that he would mumble along with the actors while the movie played, distracting Eddie throughout. That had certainly pushed his blooming crush on Richie up a few notches the same way watching Richie’s eyes light up when talking about different movies did.

 And Richie’s passion had manifested into a love for acting. And he was fucking good at it, too. Everyone who’s ever seen him go at it knows damn well that he is indisputably the best actor in Derry. Maybe even in the whole of Maine. In Eddie’s eyes, the whole world. 

 Caught up in his thoughts, Eddie comes out with, “Are you gonna go to acting school?”

 Richie jumps a little at the sudden sound of Eddie’s voice. He raises his eyebrows and speaks without taking his eyes off the road. “You think I need acting lessons?”

 “No! No. You’re incredible. I just mean for the opportunities and the experience and all of that. I thought you wanted to.”

 Richie smiles. “I do.”

 “So you are?”

 “Don’t think so.”

 Eddie deflates. “Oh,” he says quietly. Richie ventures a quick glance in his direction, chuckling at the disheartening drop of Eddie’s face.

 “Jesus, don’t look so down in the dumps. I’ll still get big one day, famous. You’ll see my face everywhere. Won’t ever have to get all flustered at night when you wish I was with you because I’ll be on a big fat poster on your ceiling.” Richie takes one hand off the steering wheel to reach over to Eddie and pinch his cheek. Eddie shrugs away from the touch, rolling his eyes and blushing hard.

 The car pulls onto Eddie’s street and his stomach drops a bit. Home sweet home.

  _Home is where the heart is,_ he thinks when he looks at Richie, his brows drawn together in thought, a serious expression on his face that he must not even realize has taken over his features. Eddie mentally chastises himself for staring. For looking in the first place. 

 Richie pulls into Eddie’s driveway, absent of any sort of vehicle because he isn’t allowed to have his own car and his mother never does any driving. She hardly leaves the house at all. Richie parks and stares at Eddie, pursing his lips and arching his eyebrows by means of temporary goodbye. Eddie smiles at him and opens the door, stepping out of the car. He waves to Richie. Richie waves back.

 Once Eddie is a safe distance from the car, he knows Richie will pull out of the driveway and fly down the street and Eddie will linger on his lawn to watch the car disappear around the corner. So he forces a deliberate laze into his actions. He doesn’t want Richie to go just yet. 

 Right as Eddie is about to finally close the van’s door and give it up, Richie cracks a goofy, smug smile and leans forward to rest his head on his arms. “You want me to come in?” he teases. Eddie shrugs. “You want me to come in,” Richie repeats, cutting the car’s idling short. He reaches across his body to unbuckle his seatbelt and then leaps out of the car, legs lengthy enough that his feet can touch the ground before he even stands up.

 Eddie follows Richie’s lead into his own house. He knows his mother _despises_ Richie, mostly because he’s loud and crude and rambunctious and he dresses like he just committed a timed robbery of a thrift store (maybe she won’t get a kick out of the fact that his jeans are shredded up and down the front today, but she’ll certainly just adore the lime green t-shirt he has on to compliment the red sneakers on his feet, silver Sharpie adorning most of the space on the shoes). Eddie had also developed a hunch back in freshman year that his mother had an inkling of his attraction to Richie. It’s in the way she stares down the two of them sitting innocently on the couch, a distasteful curl of her lip with her watchful, concerned gaze. It prickles Eddie’s skin.

 She is still in the kitchen when they walk into the house, sitting at the kitchen table with one of the gossip magazines she subscribes to flattened out in front of her. Inside is silent, but Richie’s presence turns the volume up high. “Mrs. K!” he shouts, blissfully ignorant to the glare Eddie’s mother fixes on him. “Looking gorgeous as always.”

 “Thank you,” Mrs. Kaspbrak responds, watching Eddie closely as she waits for him to speak to her. Eddie stifles a giggle and ushers Richie upstairs, ignoring the weight of mother’s heavy glare on his back. 

 “She’s such a joy,” Richie jokes at the top of the stairs, turning around the banister to head to Eddie’s room. The path is muscle memory at this point - Richie had been here countless times since they were hardly old enough to comprehend friendship for what it was, draining pointless hours out of their days by talking to each other to fill the silence. “Do you wanna see something?” he says.

 The two of them cross the threshold of Eddie’s bedroom door, which Eddie does not fail to notice is open. Not how he left it. But his closet door is shut tight, so he allows himself to relax. He shuts the door behind him and sits cross-legged on his bed, eyes trained on Richie, who stands in the center of the room.

 Eddie shrugs. “Sure.”

 And then the most horrible and incredible thing happens: Richie brings his hands to the hem of his shirt and lifts it up over his shoulders, pulling it over his head and tossing it to the carpet with an obnoxious dramatic flair. Eddie swallows and forces a confused laugh to muffle whatever else might spill out of his mouth if he’s not careful. Drool? No, he isn’t a child. He’s a grown ass legal adult who can handle himself when looking at his best friend shirtless. Like he’s seen him a million times. “Isn’t that insane?’ Richie says with a grin that convinces Eddie that this is intentional torture. 

 That’s when Eddie’s eyes focus on the impressive bruise winding up the side of Richie’s pale torso, mostly green and yellow now and swallowing his entire right side whole. He feels a twinge of guilt for not snapping his attention towards it immediately. _Loser._

 “What the fuck happened?” Eddie blurts, unable to stop himself from rising and rushing over. He touches the bruise gently, careful not to hurt Richie. There are a few smaller bruises spreading out from the largest one, sprinkled as high as his shoulder and as low as his hip.

 Richie laughs, and Eddie glance sup incredulously at him. He lifts his arm up over his head to give Eddie a better view and uses his own fingers to trace the outline of the bruises. It bewilders Eddie to see that Richie really does _not_ give a shit. “It barely even hurts anymore. Was a bitch last weekend, though.”

 “What happened?” Eddie repeats. Though he’s got a good guess.

 “Okay,” Richie starts. “So, y’know how Bev and I went to that dumbass party uptown last Friday?” Eddie nods, his suspicions already confirmed. Bev had mentioned it in passing, but no specifics, oddly enough. Eddie would like to think that this incident is something worth bringing up. “I was drunk off my ass, right, and this kid, like, twice my size comes up to me. And he picks a fight. I don’t remember what about. I don’t remember most of it, actually, but Bev told me all of this. Anyway, so he picks a fight with me and I punch him, because you gotta do what you gotta do. And this was outside the party on the sidewalk or the street or something. And he fucking _knees me_ in the _stomach_. That’s this one, I think.” 

 Richie points to a bruise down by his belly button. It’s smaller and round, flecks of purple still visible in the center. Richie shakes his head and scoffs at it. “Jesus. And then he shoved me in the middle of the street. Hard as hell. That’s what the rest of these bad boys are, I’m guessing, but I think he kicked me too, ‘cause there’s way too many for just a push and some concrete, you know? And then he ran off, I guess. Fucking pussy.”

 “You’re a fucking idiot,” Eddie mumbles, rolling his eyes. “Why would you do that?”

 Genuine question. It has to be the third drunken fight Richie’s gotten himself into in the past two months, none of which he can fully recall and none of which he can even partially explain.

Richie shrugs and bends over to grab his shirt off the floor, offering a new angle of the ugly bruises to Eddie. He looks away. “Crazy, though, am I right?” Richie says.

 Eddie sighs. “You’re a fucking idiot,” he says again. There isn’t much else to be said. 

  
  
  
  


It’s two in the morning and Eddie is pretending to try to fall asleep but grinning at his dying cell phone instead as Stan sends a photo of him smiling awkwardly, Mike’s head in the corner of the frame resting against Stan’s shoulder as he stares distractedly down at his own cell phone. Eddie smiles and saves it to a folder in his camera roll titled  _ losers ://. _

Something tiny and solid clangs against his windowpane. Eddie doesn’t have to think twice about who will be standing beneath it when he gets up, but he makes a big show of tip-toeing over to the window and making a face at a disheveled-looking Richie. He drops his act at the sight of the stream of blood flowing from Richie’s nose. Richie waves up at him like it’s nothing and points at the tree that scrapes against the siding beside Eddie’s bedroom window. 

Wobbling on his feet and looking like he might slip and tumble down to the grass any second, Richie climbs the same tree as he has for years and weasels into the window that Eddie props open for him. When Richie lands safely on his hands and knees, Eddie slams the window shut and kneels beside him. 

“Are you fucking shitting me right now?” he hisses, turning Richie’s face so he can get a better look. It’s a tremendous effort to keep his voice low. The hot burn of anger mingles with worry in his chest. Richie smiles at him, blood in his mouth. Touches Eddie’s face. Brushes a strand of hair off his forehead. Eddie, for once, doesn’t falter at the touch, pulling himself out of Richie’s reach and ordering him to stay where he is.

He creeps to the bathroom and finds a washcloth beneath the sink, dampening it underneath a stream of cold water. He finds an ice pack, too, because if his mother is good at one thing it’s being stocked up well enough to treat an entire hospital full of sick and injured people. Richie has not moved at all when Eddie returns to his room, leaving the lights off. Even the slightest flicker of light will send his mother rushing to his room in a panic. 

Eddie sighs as he sits down next to Richie again. Richie sits up straight, pinching the bridge of his nose and watching intently as Eddie scrubs his face of dried blood, all silent and with his lips pressed tight to restrain himself from saying things he’ll regret saying. 

“You’re pretty,” he says finally in a gust of withheld air, almost under his breath, almost like it was an accident, and almost like he means it. Eddie stutters in his movements for a moment, bats his eyes a few times, and then proceeds to ignore Richie entirely. “Are you mad at me?” Richie asks.

Eddie sucks on his cheeks, resisting the urge to spit out a resounding  _ yes, of course I’m mad. _ “Don’t talk. Makes it hard for me to clean your face.”

“I don’t care about my face, are you mad?” Richie persists, knitting his eyebrows together. Eddie doesn’t say anything. Richie’s face falls. “You’re mad. Come on, Eds, please.”

Eddie arches his eyebrows and scoffs. “Come on with what, Rich? You got into a fight again. You’re drunk. Again.”

“You don’t know that. I never said that.”

“You fucking reek of straight vodka.”

“Okay,” Richie argues. “What’s your point?”

Eddie purses his lips again. “Nothing. Don’t have one. Not like you’re gonna listen to me, right? I might as well be talking to a damn wall right now. You’re hammered, you aren’t going to remember this and even if you do remember it won’t matter to you because fighting random people while you’re fucked up is your new thing, right, Richie? That’s what you like to do now,  _ right _ , Richie?”

Richie stays quiet. He takes the ice pack from Eddie once he’s finishing wiping his face down and presses it to his nose without another word. Eddie throws away the bloody cloth and returns to his bed. He snatches his phone up from his comforter, no longer in the mood to continue fucking around with Stan, who’s now sent a grand total of nine photos of Mike in various stages of realization that the camera is on him. Eddie cracks the smallest of smiles and tosses his phone back down. 

“What’s funny?” Richie says.

“Don’t worry about it. Did you get hit anywhere else?” 

Richie thinks on it for a moment, lolling his head to the side and puckering his lips like it’ll help jog his memory. Eddie spots a small cut on his bottom lip that he’d somehow missed. It isn’t bleeding, but it’s open. His chest tightens. “Mmm, I think my arm but my arm doesn’t matter. I can get a new one. Or, like, nine new ones. And I’ll be on the news and shit. For having nine - no, wait, ten. Ten arms. Like, how cool is that?”

“Very cool, Richie,” Eddie sighs. He decides that he can’t be angry right now. Later, maybe, when Richie is sober enough to look him in the eye and recognize who he’s talking to and the situation at hand, he can give him a good pointless scolding that won’t change a damn thing. But not now. Not when he’s babbling about having nine brand spanking new fucking limbs.

“I went to this crazy party a while ago and I got hit in the stomach.” 

“You told me that. I saw the bruises.”

“Yeah. And today I was at the park and they made my nose bleed.”

“Who?”

“I have no fuckin’ idea. This one kid had on a shirt that looked like your shirt. The one you wear with the pink and the gray? Love that shirt. Yours is better. Anyway, he was rude as fuck so nothing like you at all, really.” Richie pauses, reconsiders. He tilts his head. “Well, you are mean sometimes but I don’t think you ever mean it. Do you mean it?”

“I never mean it, Richie.”  _ Trust me. _

“Good. I never mean it when I get into shit like this. I just never shut the fuck up and shit happens, you know?”

And that hurts. The resignation in Richie’s face and the shrug he forces out. Like this is meant to be happening to him, like he somehow deserves constant blood and battering, and for what? Eddie doesn’t understand it. He doubts he ever will. Richie knows he’s got a mouth on him and knows it’s gotten him in deep shit since they were kids, but he never learned to reign it in. Not like he hadn’t tried. He had. Too many times. But people say things and shit happens, one thing after another, chain reaction, cause and effect and then Richie’s bleeding or on the ground or pretending there aren’t tears stinging his eyes because he’s embarrassed to cry over a fight he started and Eddie wishes he could get why he’s always doing it, but there’s nothing about it that makes sense. It coincides with the incessant drunken, stoned nights that Richie insists are the highlight of his week, but yet never remembers enough of to confirm or deny that.

Eddie hates it, but he isn’t the boss of Richie. Richie’s eighteen years old. Nobody’s the boss of him anymore. 

“Yeah, Richie, I know,” he says finally. 

  
  
  


The cut on Richie’s lip reminds Eddie of how much he despises Richie’s violent habits but it also kind of does something twisty (and though he’d never ever admit it, vaguely familiar) to his stomach every time he spots it. It doesn’t help that Richie also isn’t wearing a shirt. None of them are. Who the fuck wears a shirt to go swimming? 

 Eddie looks over the edge of the cliff and wonders how the fuck he’d ever jumped off it and thought it to be _fun_. The seven of them hadn’t been to the quarry since the summer after eighth grade on the hottest day of the year, but even then they hadn’t jumped off. They’d biked down to where they could safely wade in to their comfort level without fearing the possibility of being paralyzed from the waist down after hurling themselves like lemmings. 

He’s overreacting, of course, because this isn’t nearly as high as he remembers it being when he was younger. Thirteen-year-old Eddie had been sure he’d reached the top of Everest when he stood looking straight down into the chasm of water beneath. Strangely enough, it was the act of jumping off that had made him feel like he was on the top of the world. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Richie used to hold his hand every time.

Taking in a deep inhale, Eddie takes his shirt off and folds it up, strides over to a rock to lay it out there beside his jeans. He’s left standing in his boxers. He crosses his arms over his chest and inhales, puffing it out as much as possible. He joins Beverly, standing by the edge and leaning over to stare at the water - wearing a pair of Eddie’s middle school gym shorts and a bra, a funny but oddly fitting sight. Beverly smiles at his hunched shoulders and wary eyes and giggles, slugging him playfully in the arm. 

“Don’t be a pussy.”

“I’m not a pussy,” Eddie says. “Worrying about my ability to walk in the future doesn’t make me a pussy.”  _ I’m going to college, I have to be able to walk around campus,  _ he nearly adds, but he hasn’t told them that yet so he bites his tongue. “Also, my mother will never let me hear the end of it if I lose my legs. I mean it. It’ll be the final nail in the coffin.”

“We’ve done this a hundred times, Eds, would you calm down?” Richie laughs, running up behind Eddie and grabbing his sides to drag him a little a ways back from the water and spinning him around to tackle him to the ground. 

“What are you doing?" 

“I’m not doing anything,” Richie says, pinching at Eddie’s sides. Eddie refuses to unfold his arms off his chest, so Richie pries them away and begins to tickle madly at Eddie’s stomach and sides. Eddie stifles a laugh, making quick work of reversing the situation.

Eddie sits on Richie’s legs, his bare back coated in cakey dirt and itchy blades of dead grass, and makes a beeline for Richie’s stomach. Richie grabs his hands and fends him off, somehow shifting Eddie off of him and onto the dirt beside him. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to horse around by the edge of a cliff?” Stan snorts from above them.

Eddie tilts his head back to catch Stan’s eyes. “No, my mother was more about the whole ‘don’t play at all’ shtick,” he jokes, his voice breathy and distant. Stan rolls his eyes.

“My mother encouraged playing by cliffs. Living on the edge. Quite literally. You should try it sometime, Stan, you wet end,” Richie says, propping himself up on his elbows. Though Richie does not know it, it is certainly a mistake on his part. Eddie’s eyes rake up and down Richie’s flat stomach and thin arms and the scabbed, jagged red line on his bottom lip shamelessly before he tears his eyes away, gulping and feeling guilty. He rubs a hand over his face and sighs. 

“I’m going first,” Beverly says, kicking her flip flops into the dirt. She pulls her bra strap up her shoulder and backs up ten or so feet, pushing her grown-out bangs away from her eyes. Eddie sits up, shielding his eyes from the bright sun as Beverly breaks into a sprint and launches herself off, letting out a high-pitched squeal the second her feet fly from the earth. A hard splash comes shortly after she disappears from Eddie’s vision. 

Bill runs in after her, followed by Mike and then a reluctant Stan. Ben closes his eyes when he leaps from the edge, holding his arms close to his sides.

Richie stands and grins down at Eddie, reaching out a hand to help him up. Eddie blushes when he takes Richie’s hand. He’s suddenly jealous of his eighth grade self, so ignorant to the fact that he was desperately in love with Richie Tozier (and that he was going to be for a very, very long time).

Richie lets his hand go once Eddie is on his feet. Because they’re not kids anymore. They don’t need to hold hands.

Both of them run at the same time. They jump.

  
  
  


 

Just when school starts to quiet down and Eddie starts to feel the vibrant energy that approaching summer instills in students, his mother decides it’s about time to rain on his parade.  

Two weeks since Richie had gotten in his last fight, meaning the cut on his lip had healed, not even a scar left in its place. The bruises running up and down his ribcage are long gone, too, and he’s trying (or at least he seems to be) to stay out of trouble and keep his face and body intact for as long as he can. Maybe just ‘til graduation. He’ll have other issues to solve considering he’s the valedictorian and hasn’t written down a single syllable of a speech, but Eddie decides that he’s got to tackle one Richie issue at a time.

Since Richie spends less time doing fuck-all in God-knows-where, no longer wasted off his shit most of the time, he spends more time with Eddie. Usually it’s climbing through his window at night or even during the day, definitely earning a few confused looks from neighbours and passerby who’re just trying to walk their dogs in peace, but there are a few regularly scheduled supervised visits sprinkled in as well. Supervised meaning Eddie’s mother hovering just around the corner of the living room doorway aching to hear every word exchanged between the two teenage boys on her couch.  

Richie finds it hilarious. Eddie not so much, but he can’t deny that Richie’s jokes coax a laugh or two out of him.

“Oh, my God, Eddie. This penguin documentary reminds me of the time I had sex with thirteen women in one day and got six different STDs and then died and went to heaven and came back to get a seventh STD. Doesn’t it remind you of that?” Richie says, pointing to the TV with a smile that he can’t suppress. “That one right there looks like you. Maybe that’s why I wanna fuck that penguin.”

Eddie wrinkles his nose and screws his eyes shut, shaking his head. “No?” Richie whispers.

“No.”

“Damn it. I thought it was really good.”

Apparently Sonia Kaspbrak doesn’t find it all too hysterical either.

“Are you having sex with that boy?” she says. The front door has not even fully shut yet. Eddie bursts out laughing.

“Not at all.” _Wish I could tell you otherwise._  

“Because,” she continues. Like she hadn’t heard Eddie speak, like she hadn’t even seen him open his mouth in the first place. “I know you have thoughts like that. About men, boys. Perversions.” Eddie steps back, raising his eyebrows, unable to fathom anything but displaced amusement. He coughs up something like a laugh. “And I’ve let you live with them because that’s a choice I can’t talk you out of, but acting on them is another thing entirely. Especially with him.”

What does he say? What is he supposed to say? Is there anything a person can even say in a situation like that? Eddie shakes his head, swears to himself that if he does it again he’ll wake up from this dream (nightmare?). His palms are sweaty. Thirteen-year-old Eddie should’ve seen this shit coming when he decided to be ballsy and tell his mom he liked guys… Eddie can’t recall a time he’s ever had such a strong urge to slap a past version of himself. 

The smile that had come with her original question has disappeared. Unfortunately, Eddie thinks of Richie. Right now. In the worst moment for his brain to conjure up an image of Richie laughing, smiling, touching him, it does, a crystal clear memory from that very same day. Eddie looks at his mother and huffs exasperatedly. “I’m not fucking my best friend,” he tells her. Before she can speak again, chastise him for his bad language or for his mannerisms, maybe, being a little bit too feminine when he’d turned around and stomped out the front door, slamming it behind him.

_ What? _ That’s all he can think, really.

He can’t catch up to Richie, there’s no way, so he starts walking, running his fingers through his hair. His hand comes away with singular cropped curls wound around his knuckles. He brushes them off on his jeans, keeps walking, looks down, ignores the knot in his stomach, keeps walking, looks down, ignores the image of Richie Tozier that swims behind his thoughts constantly, keeps walking, looks down, knocks on Bill Denbrough’s door. Keeps walking. Looks down. Falls asleep on Bill Denbrough’s couch for the night. 

Wakes up. 

**rich:** _hey babyboo maybe text me back!!!!!!!! i sent_ _like 12 sexy ass selfies. thought u would enjoy_

Eddie smiles. He gets up, shovels down a plate of Mrs. Denbrough’s pancakes and avoids as many sympathetic stares as Bill dishes out. The second he’s out of the house, he calls up Richie. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok!!! some of u might recognize this and that's because i posted it months ago, but i deleted it bc i thought to myself "HUH. i'm not working on this very often so it'll probably never get finished. might as well delete it"
> 
> ...yet here i am! shoutout to my very bestest friend in the entire world for talking to me abt how she loved and missed this fic. if you also loved and missed it, thank her. love u chlo.
> 
> so yeah. i will be finishing baby teeth this time. and it won't be shit (i think) (at least i'll try my best)
> 
> oh and as for updates! i won't make any promises as to when because 1.) we all know how my updating schedule worked out when it came to broken veins...lmao "once a week" my ass. what a fool. and 2.) baby teeth chaps are kinda lengthy so they take a while to write and to edit
> 
> anyway talk to me!!! what did u like?? what did u hate (but be gentle i am a leo my ego is fragile)?? what were your favorite parts/lines/characters/whatever??? i thrive off of that stuff so let a bitch know. i appreciate every comment to such an extreme level lmao. makes my day every time.
> 
> thank u for reading!!!! much appreciated!! enjoy yall :))
> 
> (title from baby teeth by flower face & fic is loosely based on the song)


	2. middle

 

Richie answers the phone with a yawn followed by, “Hey, loverboy. Need something?”

Instantly, Eddie feels a wave of relaxation wash over him. Richie’s voice alone holds Eddie’s heart in its warm hands.

 _Always kinda need something from you_. He almost says it, but he isn’t foolish. Far from it. He’s calculated, calm, collected, and well-practiced in navigating conversation with Richie without letting him know what he really wants to say. So, Eddie translates the words quickly.

“I wanna see you,” he says.

And he does. Sometimes he aches to see Richie. Every bone in his body might shatter if they ever separate forever.

He speaks low into the phone. God forbid one of his mother’s wretched little snitch friends had overheard him talking to someone on the phone. She’d have a fit and a half when he goes home. He thinks for a second, just out of pure spite, that he wishes some vicious rumor would reach her, one that says he did call up Richie and that he went to his house and that he slept with him. Just to piss her off.

He retracts that thought as soon as it comes. It would not end as well as he might imagine.

Eddie doesn’t realize that Richie hasn’t replied yet until a raspy voice on the other line says, “So come see me.”

“You don’t mind? It’s early,” Eddie says. He’s trying to be courteous, but he’s already speedwalking in the direction of Richie’s house and attempting to persuade the earth’s forces to work out in his favor for once. _Please don’t mind, Richie. You look pretty in the sunrise._

“‘Course I don’t mind, you fuckin’ idiot. I wanna see you too. I gotta put on pants, though.”

 _Or don’t?_ Eddie flushes instantly at his own thoughts. _Nevermind, bitch! Do it! I’m begging you! Please put on some fucking clothes!_

“How far are you?” Richie says. He sounds so sleepy; it makes Eddie’s heart whirl.

Eddie sighs. “Uh, not far now.”

“You’re quick. Anxious to see me?”

 _Yeah. Always._ “If it helps you sleep at night.”

Richie laughs a tired laugh, one of those little chuckles he does where his eyes close for a second and his smile is a little on the small side but it’s genuine, so it’s better than that goofy fake one he always pulls off. Probably one of Eddie’s favorites; he wishes he were there already.

“You know what does help me sleep at night?” Richie says. “A warm body next to me. Care to fill that position?”

“Holy shit,” Eddie whispers before he realizes he’s a fucking idiot, so he tacks on a jarringly less convincing: “Uh, gross. I’m all set. You gotta quit that, Richie.”

“Mhm,” Richie hums. Eddie wants to die right now. “So what other reason would you wanna come see me at the absolute ass-crack of dawn, you little freaky boy?”

“Oh, you know,” Eddie says, suddenly reminded yet again of the chain of events that had brought him to Bill’s house and, in turn, to Richie’s door step, which he’s only about five minutes from now. “Stuff. Things.”

There’s a really long pause, one in which Eddie forgets entirely that Richie is immune to social cues that involve a shift to serious subjects. “Are you - are you trying to tell me that you’re legitimately coming here to fuck me? Eddie.”

He sounds _dead serious,_ which is the most bizarre and alarming part. If his mother ever heard about this….

“Oh my fucking God, no. No. Stop thinking I’m gonna fuck you. Please, Richie.” _Seriously, please. It’ll be the death of me._

“Ah, shit, Eds. That’s a pretty hefty request. It’ll be difficult, but I can try. Can I think about it in the shower, though? Just one exception?” _Can you just please shut the actual fuck up?_

“I thought I told you to quit it.”

“My apologies. Not my fault you’re sexy or whatever.”

“I’m gonna hang up and I’m gonna turn around and go the fuck back to Bill’s house.”

“Dude, no shit. No way. Did you sleep with Bill?”

Eddie barks out a laugh. “First of all, what’s wrong with you? Second of all, I don’t think Bill even knows what gay sex is, so nevermind him fucking a guy. Actually, you’re a real fucking joker if you think he even knows gay people exist. He’s _that_ straight. Not to mention that he’s out of my league, anyway.”

Eddie stops at Richie’s front door with a grin on his face that stretches from one end of Derry to the other. It’s the most amount of amusement the town has seen in about a decade. “Come answer your door, stupid,” Eddie says, speaking over Richie’s tired laugh on the other end of the call before he hangs up.

Richie does, and before either of them has the chance to think about it, Eddie’s following Richie back up the stairs and into his room.

The whole house is nice, but Richie’s room is and always has been Eddie’s favorite part. Richie’s room doesn't look like it comes from money, not like the rest of the house - God knows that Richie’s family doesn’t need this kind of space for the three of them and their dog, Delilah. It’s all expensive furniture that Eddie won’t even think about touching for fear of breaking or staining it. Richie’s room, tucked away in the very back corner of the house with his own bathroom attached to it, is nice, but not fancy. It’s just a teenage boy’s bedroom, really.

Except it’s Richie Tozier’s. So infinitely better.

“So,” Richie says, and he lets the word linger there. His voice is cool and slow, a calming contrast to the loud colors that scream from the posters on his wall. Richie lies down across his bed and looks up at Eddie with warm and tired eyes when he sits timidly beside Richie. “Whatcha thinking about?”

Eddie doesn’t respond straight away. Quite frankly, he doesn’t know if he’s thinking about any one thing. He turns to Richie to say exactly this, but the drowsy hand pressed against his cheeks combined with the Star Wars pajama pants, the bed head, and the puddles of lavender staining the pale skin beneath his eye, Eddie forgets every one of the ten thousand other subjects running around in his mind. “My mom’s a _cunt_. I wish I’d told her yes.”

“Told her yes?” Richie raises an eyebrow. “Told her yes to what?”

After a moment filled with silence and eye contact, Eddie settles on, “A lot of things.” _Am I having sex with that boy?_ _Uh huh. All the fucking time, Ma_. Richie doesn’t notice that Eddie laughs shakily to himself at this. _In my dreams -- quite literally._

Eddie sighs. He might as well just say it, or else what has he come here to do? Leave Richie in the dark while he whines? "She thinks I'm fucking you, I guess. She asked me if I was." He blushes when he says this - he can't help it.

“You wish you'd said yes?” Richie says. A grin creeps across his face. "You should've." Eddie’s whole body tenses up and a blush rips across his complexion. Richie may as well have accused him of murder.

“I mean,” Eddie starts. “Would’ve pissed her off. Which is what I want. But then I can't hang out with you at all, so I lose.”

“Just start bringing guys home, dude,” Richie says, but it only takes a second for him to retract it. “Wait, no. Don’t do that. Come up with something else.”

“She’s already pissed at me for -” _College. Is it physically possible for me to shut the fuck up?_

Richie catches it. Richie’s always been quick on things like that. And not just quick, but persistent, too. “Continue,” he teases, beaming up at Eddie again. _You make it so difficult for me to shut my mouth, Richie Tozier._

For a couple seconds, Eddie just looks at him. And he thinks about what Richie might say if he tells him that in a couple months, once the summer comes to a close, he’s fucking out of Derry forever. What if Richie says that his fate isn’t the same? Richie doesn’t like Derry, but maybe he just doesn’t feel the need to flee it like Eddie does.

Except… he gets the shit beaten out of him by an awful lot of the town’s residents. Maybe a few too many. And those are meant to be his peers. Maybe Richie wants out, too.

Richie looks at him, expectant. Because now Eddie can’t say that there isn’t anything, considering he’s just staring at Richie with his lips parted and his eyes unblinking and a fading blush on his cheeks. He’s made it too fucking obvious. “College,” he blurts, desperate for something, anything to cling to and ride with. “I, um, got in. To college. New York.” _Full sentences, you ever heard of ‘em?_

“Eds,” Richie says, leaping up and closer to Eddie. Their fingers touch on the comforter. Eddie’s looking at his best friend, though, and they’re talking about adult things, so Eddie isn’t thinking about that at all. Except he definitely is, isn’t he? Gross. “That’s fucking incredible. You’re serious?”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs. “Yeah, I am.”

Richie grins so wide that Eddie think he just might break.

“Can I, like, hug you? Is that appropriate here?” Richie asks. For a second, Eddie wants to laugh, because everything about that sentence and the guarded, unsure look on Richie’s face is the pinnacle of what’s been running through his head nonstop for the past six years.

“You can kiss me,” he says. Kind of on accident. Maybe he’s bold. _I’m not bold._

Richie brushes it off with a chuckle and a hug, a tight and warm one that Eddie returns, though he’s sure it can’t be as good on the other end. Richie’s all soft fabrics and soft touches and soft hair and it’s truly, utterly, undeniably driving Eddie into insanity.

To Eddie’s surprise, Richie actually does kiss him. On the cheek. Light as air, a butterfly’s wing flapping by, almost unnoticed but not quite. Without thinking, Eddie pulls out of the hug and touches his hand to his cheek, right where Richie’s lips had pressed, right where a blush crawls over his skin again now.

“Too much?” Richie jokes, reaching forward and tapping a finger against Eddie’s knuckles. Eddie shakes his head, forces his own laugh. “Careful what you wish for, Eds.” _Yeah, huh? I should really think shit through._ “I’m happy for you, though. And, hey, if I ever hear back from one of those shitty NY schools I applied to, maybe we can get some apartment somewhere. Meet in the middle, maybe, halfway between both our schools. That’d be so cool, right?”

_He does want out. He wants out with me._

Eddie nods. “Really cool. You could bring Delilah. But you have to clean up her shit.”

Richie laughs and pushes off of Eddie’s shoulder with a tight squeeze of his fingers, falling onto his back to stare up at the bedroom ceiling. It’s not even visible, every inch of it covered with layers of movie posters. If you peel one layer back, you’d uncover another era of the film geek in Richie Tozier.

Eddie joins him, something Richie had said gnawing at his brain. “Wait,” he says, grabbing Richie’s attention. “You haven’t heard back from any schools?”

“Nope,” Richie says. A hollow, disheartened sigh escapes him.

“You will, though. Right?”

“Don’t sound so confident, Eds. You’re really getting my hopes up here,” Richie sighs, turning his head so he can look at Eddie’s face, waiting for some sort of reaction. Eddie’s cheeks are still burning up, and he’s acutely aware of this fact. He hopes that Richie isn’t.

“No, I _am_ confident. You have to get in because if you don’t, then who am I supposed to live with and leech off of when you blow up and get famous?”

Richie smiles. “Fair point,” he says. “Why are you blushing?”

Eddie would deny it, but the heat in his cheeks is worsening by the second. “Why are _you_ blushing?”

“I’m not.”

“Fair point,” Eddie echoes, and Richie sputters out a confused (but successfully distracted) laugh.

And if Eddie were to be quite frank with himself and with anybody who might ask, he would have to say that after that, everything goes to shit. For a week, Richie is absent. He disappears from school, and Eddie gets _nothing._ Not a text or a phone call or pebbles at his window followed by his dumbass best friend scrambling in to talk drunken nonsense until he falls asleep. Radio silence. Cut off.

Of course, Eddie knows that it isn’t his fault. He didn’t do anything. And if this is about the kiss on the cheek - which really, it shouldn’t be - then Richie has himself to blame because he’s the one who did that. Maybe Eddie planted the seed with his half-joke but he didn’t _make_ Richie do anything. So there’s that.

There’s also the fact that Eddie has to go back to his mother’s house on the same day that Richie had promised him (without really promising, but in Eddie’s mind, it’s all so absolute) a future far enough away from Derry, Maine that Eddie wouldn’t be able to hear his mother’s whining about his life choices. He shows up at home and he makes himself something to eat. It’s summer and the house is fucking freezing beyond repair. His mother ignores him. He ignores her right back, just as he’d been planning to.

Then he spends every night for a week in his room. By himself. Because, once again, Richie never comes.

And then, a beam of light strikes up from nothing in the form of two texts that pop up on Eddie’s phone when he’s staring at Richie’s most recent Instagram photo.

 **ben:** _Eddie, you should come to my place today! Everyone’s coming._

 **ben:** _Including Richie. Just btw._

Eddie snorts at the texts, and at himself for being so elated at the latter one. Richie’s coming. He can see Richie. Huh. If he ever gets dressed quicker than he does after reading that over five or six times, no one will ever know.

Ben is nothing close to a liar, so when Eddie slips into the basement of his house where the TV and the couch are situated beside a shelf that tips forward with the weight of the board games piled up on it, his eyes land immediately on Richie. He’s talking to Bill on the floor in front of the sofa, smiling between every few words and nodding every time Bill laughs.

Eddie sits down beside him. He doesn’t say anything.

“Hi, Eddie,” Bill greets him. Richie jumps as if he hadn’t noticed Eddie’s presence before. He mumbles something of a hello accompanied by an unconvincing smile. Eddie would balk at that if it weren’t for the brilliant purple bruise that takes over the left half of Richie’s face. It swallows every inch of skin within the vicinity of his eyes. Richie must know that he notices this, because he tears his face away too quickly for Eddie to reach out and touch.

Somewhere on the far side of the room, Eddie hears Beverly calling out his name. Struck by the sight he’d just seen, Eddie hesitates for a moment, very much aware of Bill’s expectant and confused eyes on him. The weight of that gaze lifts Eddie to his feet.

“Bev!” he calls out, approaching her with open arms. She falls into his chest, still somehow just the right height to nuzzle her forehead into his shoulder when she pulls him closer.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says. It’s like she _knows_ Eddie’s got a muddled pot of shitty emotions stirring up inside him. Her intuition has always confounded him. “You look so cute. There’s food upstairs and I was wondering if you wanted to maybe give me a hand bringing a few things down? Ben ran to the store for soda because Bill’s bitch ass chugged it all down.”

The interaction is simple, but offers a complete and utter lack of subtlety to anyone who actually knows Beverly. Her code had been cracked back in the ninth grade - if Beverly Marsh compliments you and then asks you out of a crowded room, she knows what’s up and wants to give you a quick one-on-one therapy session. This particular one happens to take place in Ben Hanscom’s tiny kitchen and is made up entirely of small voices and chips being poured into bowls.

“So you know that I know that you’re totally obsessed with that crackhead MMA fighter down there, right?” Beverly says over her shoulder as she stands on her tip-toes to grab for a tub of cheese balls.

For a moment, Eddie gapes at her. Not because she’d just acknowledged what he’d always refused to admit aloud - though she is right, he does know that she knows - but because she’d said it as casually as if she’d just been asking about his day.

“I’ll take that as a yes, you do know that?”

Eddie forces a laugh. “Yeah, no. I know that.” He really hadn’t, but it comes as no surprise to him. He hadn’t exactly been subtle all these years.

“Okay. So what’s this racket I’ve been hearing from him?”

At this, Eddie perks up. _So he won’t talk to me, but he’ll talk to other people about me? Where the fuck is the logic in that?_ “I’d love to know, actually,” Eddie says. He takes a bag of chips from Beverly’s hand and tears it open, dumping the entire thing into a bowl that’s definitely designed to hold one serving of cereal and not a whole bag of Doritos. Eddie doesn’t really notice.

“How ‘bout I man the snacks and shit, you just talk to me, okay?” Beverly scoots into his space, bumping his hip gently so he takes a step backwards.

He sighs. “So? What’d he tell you?”

“That you’re mad at him.” Beverly glances up at him, searching for some sort of reaction that says otherwise. “That you two aren’t talking.”

“That’s not my fault,” Eddie protests, much calmer than he expects of himself. “That’s all him. He won’t text, he won’t call, he won’t even, like, show up to my house unannounced and try to start a fight with my mother.”

Beverly snorts. “You like it when he does that?”

“I _love it_ when he does that.”

A moment of silence lingers around that, specifically around the word _love_. Eddie realizes very quickly that it’s the first time he’s said it out loud in the way that he means it. Richie knows Eddie loves him, of course. The same way Bev knows that Eddie loves her. The same way every soul in this house right now knows that Eddie loves them. Not the way that Eddie really, really wants to shout from the fucking rooftops.

“If he doesn’t text you, why don’t you text him? Ever occur to you?”

Eddie scratches his cheek and leans up against the counter with his arms crossed against his chest. “I guess,” he says, dragging the words out lazily. “But, I mean. Do you text Ben first?”

“All the time.”

“Before you guys started dating?”

Beverly bites back a grin. “No, I didn’t. Are you trying to imply that you and Rich are in some sort of pre-dating phase, then?”

A legitimate cackle almost escapes Eddie’s throat. “No. Absolutely not. He’s so not into me, which is fine. I’ve gotten used to it.”

Beverly grins and rips her eyes away from Eddie’s, her hair falling over her face and hiding whatever it is in her eyes that she’s trying to mask. “No comment.”

 _No fucking comment?_ Eddie might puke. Like, really. Vomit all over Ben’s family’s shiny, clean linoleum floor.

“Can I opt in for the comment?”

“Why aren’t you dickheads talking?” Beverly veers. Eddie isn’t even going to try to get the conversation back where he so desperately needs it to be, because it’s a futile effort. Another of Beverly’s many fantastic social talents includes getting the conversation where she thinks it should be in record time.

“I have no fucking idea. I want to talk to him. So bad.” The brutal honesty of his own words hits Eddie in the gut. He misses Richie.

“Can I give you a piece of advice?”

“Yeah, actually. I’d really appreciate that.”

“It’s pretty out there, but, uh….” Beverly holds two bowls of chips out to him and Eddie takes one into each hand. “Talk to him,” Beverly suggests with an offhand shrug, shouldering past him with her own food in hand.

“Brilliant. Thank you, Bev,” Eddie sighs as he follows her lead.

Eddie completely intends to follow Beverly’s wonderful, unheard of, wise advice as soon as he steps back into the basement. The plan he formulates in the fifteen seconds it takes him to walk down the stairs includes simply asking Richie to step aside with him so they can find the source of this trivial issue and hash things out. Richie will flirt with him once the emotional weight of it all is out of the way, and Eddie will ignore the fact that he’s flirting because he knows it’s not real. He’ll blush like an idiot and Richie will get a kick out of it. Then they can get on with their night as usual, just one amongst many. Happily ever after.

Except Richie isn’t there when Eddie and Bev get downstairs. Everyone else is. Stan and Mike are squished onto the same couch cushion, Bill is still sitting on the floor with his head tilted up to talk to the two of them and Ben, who must’ve snuck in without Bev and Eddie noticing, is standing to speak to Beverly.

“Where the fuck did Richie go?” Eddie blurts without meaning to.

The responses include nothing but blank, sympathetic stares. It hits Eddie then that they all must _know_. It’s a minute blow. Nothing compared to the fact that Richie appears to want to do absolutely anything else in the world besides talking to Eddie.

Finally, Bill offers something in reply. “He said he had to get home. Something with his dad.”

“Richie does jack shit for his dad. And you know that,” Eddie mumbles. “He’s lazy.” And he is. He’d quit the only part time job he ever had back in the tenth grade because he didn’t wanna get up in the morning to go to his shifts.

Bill shrugs and shakes his head, murmuring something about how he doesn’t know what’s up. “I’m sorry, Eddie,” Beverly says. She crosses her arms across her chest, joining Eddie on the couch as he perches himself on the arm. Her hair tickles his arm as she leans in to watch his phone screen, arching her eyebrows.

_where the actual fuck did u go lmao._

“Sounds a little bitter, don’t you think?”

“Mhm,” Eddie agrees. He’s about to shove his phone in his front pocket but it goes off before he gets a chance.

 **rich:** _for a walk_

 **rich:** _what’s wrong_

_i could ask u the same question_

Richie doesn’t answer that text.

  
  


The following day, a Saturday, Beverly calls Eddie’s phone.

“I talked to Richie a little bit on the phone last night. We talked about you.” That’s what she says. Before a _hello_ or a _how are you_ , that’s what she says into the phone, and that’s what makes Eddie choke on nothing and jump out of his skin to sit up straight. _Richie was talking about me again Richie was talking about me again Richie was talking about me again._

“Okay,” Eddie says, trying to remain composed, but it’s such a struggle. Maybe this will fix things, or maybe it won’t. Maybe Beverly has no fucking clue what anything Richie said meant, just like Eddie has no fucking clue what it means when Richie calls him pretty or touches his face and then totally blows him off without the slightest trace of a disagreement.

Then he remembers that this is Beverly. Beverly knows everything; Eddie wouldn’t be surprised if Beverly knows when the world is going to end. Maybe it’s today.

“What’d he say?”

“He isn’t mad at you. He’s sad. You know him.”

Eddie’s heart sinks. “He’s sad? Because of me?” _I’m sad because of him._

“Not because of you. Because of him and you.”

_Oh, what the fuck? What the fuck? What does that mean? What does that mean and why won’t he just fucking kiss me sometime so I can stop thinking about it right now when I’m this pissed? Why can’t he call me himself?_

“Uh, okay.” Beverly doesn’t say anything. “I’m gonna throw up, I think.”

“Why is that?”

“Can you tell me what he said?”

“He didn’t really make any sense. I don’t know. He was just, like, upset about you. Talking about you.”

“Really?”

“Said you’re his boy or something. And yes, before you ask, he did word it like that,” Beverly says. Her voice is like warm honey over the phone, and Eddie can tell she’s chewing gum because the snap of it in her mouth cuts in between her words. It doesn’t distract Eddie one bit from what she’s saying.

He can hear it now, running through his mind at rapid speed in Richie’s voice. _Eds is my boy, you know?_

And he’s still mad, really, because he doesn’t deserve to be left in the dark like this, and he’s entirely aware of the anger that sits in his stomach, waiting patiently to bubble over and blow the fuck up. However, he’s also thinking really hard about what Beverly just fucking said.

Eddie is so glad this is a phone call because he’s blushing into oblivion. _I’m Richie’s boy._

“He said that? No bullshit?” Eddie whispers into the phone. He flips onto his stomach and leans his head against his hand.

“Would I lie?” Bev says. She wouldn’t. “I think he’s sweet on you, if I’m fully honest. Gets this crazy look in his eyes whenever he talks about you. I’ve never seen anything like it. Ben doesn’t even look at me like that.”

 _Do not say that to me._ “Ben looks at you like you’re a blessing, Beverly.”

“My point exactly.”

Eddie thinks about that for the majority of the night. It drips into his dreams, Beverly’s words alongside Richie’s imagined ones, swirling around in a coat of warmth and comfort that nurses Eddie through the night and unties the knot in his chest as he dozes off.

He wakes up to a clang against his window. His heart slams against his ribcage as he scrambles towards the window. He leans halfway out of it. Eddie almost slips when stands on his toes to push his torso further out, and he’s inaudible when he breathes out a relieved and adoring, “Rich.”

Because there he is. The very subject of Eddie’s every thought for the past week, the very subject of almost every thought since middle school. Richie looks up at him, and it’s dim outside but enough light leaks through the trees for Eddie to see that his eyes are glassy, and there’s nothing fresh on his face besides that dumb bruise.

“You can get in yourself. I’ll leave the window open,” Eddie says, trying to force a hardness into his voice that just won’t overpower the shakiness that accompanies the shock of seeing him. He wants Richie to know that he’s mad, because he _is_ so fucking mad, and it pisses him off even more that he’s so weak for this boy that he can’t even get the anger out.

Richie climbs in successfully, and Eddie steps back to sit on the edge of his bed, a cold enough distance by his standards. Richie seems to consider stepping closer; ultimately, he decides against it.

“So, uh,” he says, clearing his throat and mussing up his hair. “Hey.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything. He has chills running up his arm because Richie’s voice is in the space of his room for the first time in what feels like a millenium.

“You’re mad, that’s cool.” Richie shrugs his shoulders and forces himself to make eye contact. “I get it. It’s fine. I’d be mad, too.”

“Thanks for the permission.”

“Do you wanna forgive me?”

Eddie scoffs and stares at Richie, mouth agape. “What, you come into my room in the middle of the night and you think that’s enough of an apology? You think I’m _that_ into you?”

Eddie has more to say, but he snaps his mouth shut and leans back a little, crossing his arms tightly across his chest and making his very best effort to not glance in Richie’s direction. He’s an idiot, but so is Richie, right? Richie won’t notice that slip of the tongue, right? _Right?_

“Okay,” Richie says, and holy _shit_ , he’d noticed. There’s absolutely no way he hadn’t. Eddie might faint. He sounds unsure, surprised, maybe unnerved, too. Eddie gets it, he does. He’d been expecting this.

Except he really hadn’t because he was never, _ever_ going to tell Richie, no matter how much it seemed like he was destined to be eternally desperate for his best friend. He had never planned on opening his fucking mouth about it.

Yet, here they are.

“I _am_ really sorry,” Richie says, and it sounds like a plea more than it sounds like a statement. “You have to know that. You have to. You know me. But, I mean, do you…. You see my face, right? You would’ve flipped.”

“Okay, and I always do. So? I help you anyway, Richie. That’s us.”

“And I like us.” _Why do we sound like a couple? Do we always sound like this? I really fucking hope we don’t always sound like this. Is he doing this to torture me?_ “I just got a little nervous. Didn’t want you to worry.”

“So you left me to wonder if you hated me? Cool.”

“ _Eddie._ ”

Silence.

“Eddie, you’re gonna leave me in a few months,” Richie says. It’s the lowest Eddie has ever heard his voice; it’s barely a whisper. Eddie’s inclined to think that maybe Richie hadn’t even said it aloud, that it was just an echo of a thought that had somehow become audible.

Eddie just stares. It’s ridiculous, too, what he’d said. He wishes that he hadn’t heard it. “I wouldn’t do that.” His volume is a hundred times that of Richie’s, and Richie’s gaze lingers on Eddie’s bedspread for a long time before he gives in and comes to sit next to him.

Like, right next to him. Their sides would be aligned completely if Eddie didn’t lean slightly in the opposite direction to avoid precisely that.

“Except you have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything. You’re getting into college.”

“Odds aren’t shaping up to be in my favor at the moment, Eds. I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Richie snaps, but he regrets it immediately. Eddie can tell by the way he looks tentatively at him afterwards, his face not far enough away to be a comfortable distance, his tongue pushed up against the inside of his bruised cheek like he’s trying to block any more words that might come bubbling to the surface. After a long, cold silence, Richie adds, “Forget it.”

It clicks in Eddie’s head, right then and there, that there’s some kind of connection between this predicament they’re in and Richie’s behavior. If only he knew what the fuck that connection is, maybe they could get somewhere.

“Where’d you get the bruise?” Eddie says. Richie seems grateful for the subject change, and, though Eddie already knows Richie’s reply will offer absolutely nothing of value, he’s glad too. The two of them had been subject to equal word vomit tonight, and Eddie hopes Richie is as glad for his lack of acknowledgement as Eddie is for Richie’s.

“Uh, kid at a party. I was really high, I don’t know.”

“You were really high?” Eddie deadpans. “On what, crack?”

“See?” Richie keens, face lighting up like a Christmas tree all of a sudden. “See? I missed that.”

Eddie’s already blushing, but despite that, he says, “What?” _Talk more. I wanna hear it._

“You’re funny,” Richie says. He scoots a few inches closer to Eddie with this puppy dog look in his eyes. And for a second, just one, Eddie thinks--

“So, this kid who punched you,” Eddie says, rushing to fill the space between them with _something_ . ”Is that who you’ve been hanging out with when you could’ve been hanging out with me instead?” Eddie can hear Beverly now: _You are so fucking petty._

Richie plays along, understanding Eddie’s apparent forgiveness for what it is: conditional. “Mhm, yeah, actually. He’s way hotter than you.”

“Wow. Way out of your league, then.”

Richie shrugs and laughs softly. “Yeah. I like shooting a little out of my league, you know.”

Eddie replies only with a small nod and a short laugh. _What are you trying to say right now?_

Richie leans his head against Eddie’s shoulder and leaves it there, and Eddie pauses for a moment to give himself a reality check. He can feel Richie’s breathing, calm and slow, against his arm, and his hair is brushing against Eddie’s neck. He’s warm and he smells like cheap, shitty cologne that Eddie knows he only bought because Beverly told him he should, but he wears it everyday because he actually really likes it. Eddie really likes it, too.

He smiles to himself and hopes desperately that Richie doesn’t notice the shift in his weight as he leans a little bit into him. Richie does. All he does is laugh quietly into Eddie’s shoulder as Eddie blushes a bright pink.

  
  


Somehow everything clicks back into place, same as always. The remaining days of their senior year dwindle down into nothing, and before any of the losers can think twice, they’re on the other side of graduation and their families are watching as the realization settles onto all seven of them.

It settles quickly. Then they’re over it. Good riddance.

Mike takes all of them out to eat, his treat, to celebrate. Richie sits next to Eddie in a booth that’s meant to fit four people but that they’ve made work for all of them. His proximity is electrifying, to say the absolute least. Eddie’s hands stay planted firmly on the table instead of on his legs so he doesn’t have a chance to let them wander towards Richie’s. But Richie puts his hands up on the table, too. Eddie stares and thinks really hard about all the possible different outcomes at hand, all the different things that could happen if he just reached out and touched Richie’s hand. Not even if he were to hold it. Just touch it. Pretend it was an accident.

He clears his throat and his head when Bill pulls up a chair to the end of the table and starts talking to Ben, who’s squeezed in on Eddie’s other side.

“So,” Richie says, cupping his chin in his hand and leaning flirtatiously towards Eddie. He bats his eyelashes and grins when he says, “Mr. Kaspbrak, how does it feel to be a Derry High School graduate?”

“Incredible. Couldn’t be prouder. How does it feel to have a 4.0 GPA, you fucking nerd?”

“Ouch. And here I was thinking you thought my grades were sexy. I worked my ass off for four years for nothing?”

Eddie smiles and allows himself to keep eye contact with Richie when he says, “Not for nothing.” It brings a smile to Richie’s face at the very least, so it’d been worth the exertion.

Richie’s the one to touch Eddie’s hand first. It’s after they’ve ordered, after the food comes to the table and they all start picking off each other’s plates like best friends always do. Eddie freezes for a second, because he’s using the other hand to take fries off of Beverly’s plate, Beverly’s looking at him, and she sees it just as well as Eddie does.

Thing is, if Eddie had worked up enough courage earlier on, if he’d really gone for it, then he would’ve pulled away the second there’d been even a chance that someone had seen. He would’ve started hyperventilating, probably, if someone acknowledged it, and he would’ve fainted if _Richie_ would’ve acknowledged it.

But Richie does none of the above. He just takes Eddie’s hand in his and moves them from the top of the table to his leg, balancing them on his thigh as he continues to eat, unflinching. Eddie stares. Then he realizes that’s going to draw attention to them, so he looks up at Beverly, and she’s looking at him which is almost worse then if everybody were to be looking, because Beverly _knows_. She knows so well. But she spares him, and she pretends like she didn’t even see a thing. Eddie thanks her silently.

Richie lets go of Eddie’s hand when they all move to stand up. Eddie knows that it’s because Richie knows how fast Mrs. Kaspbrak would lose her damn mind if one of the informants that she calls _friends_ happened to be in the right place at the right time. Eddie smiles at him in thanks. Richie smiles back. Eddie realizes that it’s the first semi-acknowledgement they’ve made of whatever that had been.

_We won’t talk about it, though._

Richie drives Eddie home, and on the way there he turns on the radio, which barely works. There’s mostly just some static noises with something akin to music buzzing a million miles away. Eddie turns it off. Richie eyes him with a smile and lights a cigarette, making sure to hold it by the window while he drives so Eddie doesn’t catch a whiff of the smoke.

“Do you want me to come in?”

“Don’t you think it’s best that you don’t?”

Richie grins wider. “Probably. You wanna go to mine?”

“Don’t you think it’s best that I don’t?” Eddie repeats, and Richie laughs again. Eddie sighs. “I wish, though.”

Richie’s quiet for a moment. He throws his lit cigarette out the window and rolls it back up, then seems to consider something, his eyebrows drawn close together and his lips pressed into a tight line. After a moment, he breaks the silence with his voice. He’s all soft again, almost impossible to hear, but Eddie can make it out. “Eddie,” he says. “Can I ask you a question?”

Eddie scoffs. “Obviously.”

The silence that preludes Richie’s reply is long, and Eddie’s heart grows vulnerable under the pressure of it. He’s listening to Richie’s breathing, slow, bated, thoughtful, and his heart is racing to twice the tempo of it. Finally, Richie spits it out. He puts deliberate effort into making sure Eddie hears each word clearly, makes every second of such a short phrase count. “Do you know?”

_Do I know? Do I know what? Do I know that you’re looking at me right now? Yes. Do I know that we held hands, like, half an hour ago? Yes. Would be pretty hard to forget. What could I not know?_

The thumping of Eddie’s heart ceases its race to first place in Richie’s. His face glows, because Eddie feels something in Richie’s words; he’s not sure what, exactly, but he feels it in the way Richie’s eyes stray from the road and land on his face, the way his gaze lingers there.

“Know what?” he murmurs. He looks at the road in front of them because somebody has to, but Richie keeps his eyes locked on Eddie’s every move. _Please tell me._

Eddie gives in and looks at Richie. He swallows hard as he turns his head in one quick motion to face him. Just as quickly as their eyes meet, Richie looks away with a short nod and a faint smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. Eddie sighs. His shoulders are heavy and his lungs feel like lead. “What don’t I know?”

Richie has to think about it, and that’s why Eddie knows he’s changed the subject when he answers with, “Still nothing from New York for me, you know.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He leaves it at that, because Richie had left it at _do you know._

“Yeah.” Richie pulls into Eddie’s driveway smoothly and puts the car in park before he turns his body completely towards Eddie. Eddie just looks him up and down. Doesn’t move his body to match, as much as he aches to. “Will you go if I can’t?”

Eddie’s breath hitches for a moment. He finds himself with his lips parted just a bit and his eyebrows furrowed, forming harsh lines in between them. He hadn’t thought about that possibility. Not for a second. “That won’t happen, so.” _It won’t._

“It could,” Richie urges. “You never know. It could. Would you stay with me? In Derry?”

“In Derry?” _There’s only about six things I’d ever stay in Derry for, Richie._

“In Derry,” Richie says, nodding as if he’s trying to assure himself as well. “You’d have to take a gap year. Live with me, of course, not with your stupid mom. Would you do it?”

Eddie doesn’t answer - he doesn’t get a chance to. His mother steps out of the front door and starts shouting words that Eddie can’t hear from inside Richie’s car, but he knows for sure that if he doesn’t get the fuck inside, he’s in for it. He looks to his mom and then to Richie. Richie nods.

“Go,” he says. “We’ll talk later. Or not. It’s no big deal.”

“Okay,” Eddie whispers. He bites his lip. Something else begs to be said.

He doesn’t say it.

“Goodnight, Eds,” Richie says.

“Goodnight, Rich.” _I wish I could kiss you but she’s looking._

Eddie gets out of the car and braces himself for his mother’s harsh words. On his way up the front steps and past her, she fixes him with a cold stare, one that she transfers onto Richie the second Eddie slips into the house. Eddie doesn’t hear Richie’s car start for a minute or so longer. He grins to himself as he heads into the kitchen. _He’s such a fucking asshole. I love him._

The door shuts with a slam that makes Eddie jump out of his skin. Chills run down his back when his mother steps into the kitchen, silent.

“I thought we talked about him.”

Eddie sighs and turns to face her. _You’re eighteen years old._ “You think we talk about a lot of things, Ma. I think it’s just you that’s doing all the talking.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Eddie,” she says, and she’s trying to whisper, Eddie bets, but she’s hissing. It makes him feel like prey; weak and helpless in his own home, but it isn’t a new feeling. It’s all he’s ever known.

“About what?”

“About him.”

“About Richie?” Eddie says, a scoff clipping through the words. “I think I’ve made myself fairly clear, Ma.” _Shut up. God. I’ve really been taking notes from Richie, huh?_

“ _Yes,_ about Richie,” his mother says. Eddie wants to scream, but it’s dark out, it’s night. People are sleeping. Eddie cares about people - nature and nurture do not play equal part in Eddie Kaspbrak. “You haven’t been clear, Eddie, because you’re lying.”

“About what? Did I ever say I _didn’t_ wanna fuck him when you asked, Ma? Did I ever say that?”

“Watch your mouth.”

“I won’t. Richie doesn’t.”

“He’s uncivilized.”

“You are.”

“ _Eddie_.”

“ _Mother._ ”

“He’s dirty, Eddie.”

 _Just say it. Richie’d want you to say it._ So he says it. Lowering his voice to a gossipy whisper, he says it. “That’s kinda hot, though, isn’t it?”

Eddie’s mother starts screaming. Totally blows her top. Eddie, for once in his life, doesn’t want to join her at the sight. Instead, he really and truly aches to laugh in her face.

He goes to his room, where he takes out his cell phone and opens up his messages with Richie, which he takes a moment to stare at. He thinks really hard about whether or not he should text him. Like, _really_ hard. Almost headache inducing, but then he decides to do something else for himself tonight: to stop being a pussy and just type the stupid text.

_i just told my mom that i think ur hot LMAO_

_Okay, casual enough. Go me. An A+ in heterosexual platonic best bros texting skills._

The texts he gets back within an instant turns that on its head, but Eddie grins at his screen as it lights up anyway. Richie’s contact name is enough.

 **rich:** _but she already knew that_

 **rich:** _n so did i_

 **rich:** _teehee_

Eddie doesn’t really wince at that. Not as much as he thinks he should.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> didn't take me too long to update.......not bad for a girl with one brain cell.
> 
> also excuse that weird thing ao3 does w italics where it like spaces out quotation marks or something idk u know what i mean. i cba to go thru and fix it but sorry if it irritates u bc it irritates me too.
> 
> shoutout to chloe for proofreading and also for sending me a screenshot of the "not for nothing" line followed by a message that said "THIS BULLSHIT" when i asked her if she had a favorite line. that's what friends are for, kids
> 
> as usual i hope you all enjoyed this chapter :) i rlly like it richie and eddie really be like: fucking dumb. leave a comment like subscribe buy my merch link in bio come to my tour pay my bills etc etc etc love you allllllll!!!


	3. end

In the peaceful period that settles over Eddie’s life for the two weeks following, he spends all his time with Richie. Texting Richie, calling Richie, sitting with Richie in either one of their rooms or next to each other while they’re hanging out with the losers. It’s ultimately the best and worst feeling in the entire world to be so close to someone but crave to be closer. Eddie thinks about Richie all the time. Eddie thinks about Richie even when Richie is looking at him, even when he doesn’t have to be thinking about him for him to be present.

He just wants Richie to want him. It’s an all-consuming want.

He’s stuck in an in-between state of mind when it comes to Richie’s feelings towards him, though. Beverly had dropped sufficient hints, but those hints could also be misconstrued by Eddie’s lovestruck mind or just flat-out teasing on her part, so he isn't sure that's reliable. So he handles it the only way he knows how. Eddie pulls her aside in Stan’s house while Bill goes on and on about a girl he’d met at the bakery last week who he swears he’s gonna marry someday. Audrey something-or-other. Eddie doesn’t care - or, well, he does, but not in this present moment. Richie eyes Eddie, lets his eyes follow him as he taps on Beverly’s shoulder and nods in the direction of the hallway. Eddie feels his gaze and he hopes that Beverly catches sight of it, too. Just this once, Eddie hopes someone sees.

“Is that Richie’s shirt?” Beverly whispers. Eddie shushes her immediately. Richie’s still looking at them, sitting up straight so he can crane his neck and get a better look. When Eddie catches his eyes, Richie looks away.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, forcing himself to turn his full attention to Beverly. He can practically feel Richie’s head snap back in their direction. It is Richie’s shirt. His favorite shirt. It’s so worn that the threads at the bottom are frayed and there’s a button missing on the flannel sleeve and somewhere under the collar there’s two or three holes Richie had somehow managed to rip into it. It’s comfortable. What can Eddie say? “Can you tell me something?”

Beverly raises her eyebrows. “I can tell you pretty much anything, Eddie.”

It takes a great amount of strength for Eddie to get his next words out. “Does Richie like me?”

It doesn’t take a great amount of strength for Beverly to get her next words out. “Probably. I mean, I think so.”

“You think so?”

Beverly shrugs. “He hasn’t ever said it, you know, out loud or anything. But Stan mentioned it to me once and when I started paying attention I saw it, too. I figured you both knew but that you didn’t wanna fuck anything up. With your friendship and stuff, I mean.”

“Paying attention to what?”

“He touches you, he talks about you, he smiles everytime you open your mouth, he flirts with you even after you blush so hard you nearly vomit. And he lets you wear that ugly shirt of his, apparently. I asked for it last year.”

This is all news to Eddie, but all somehow still so familiar. Richie does do those things.

But everybody does those things with their best friends. It doesn’t mean you wanna kiss them or fuck them or hold their hand. It doesn’t mean shit.  _ Unless you actually do hold their hand one time. Does that count? _

He says that out loud to Beverly. He tells her carefully and keeps his voice as low as humanly possible, because nobody else needs to know and Richie doesn’t need to know that he’s sharing it. Especially if it turns out that it’s meaningless.

“Oh, wow,” Beverly says, her eyebrows shooting up. Her lips form a small round  _ O _ as she looks at Eddie incredulously. “That’s what that was all about? Why are you asking me if he likes you? He likes you.”

“Yeah?”

“Eddie,” Beverly says, a sudden sternness coming about her. She puts one hand on each of his arms and squeezes, like she’s trying to pinch him out of whatever nightmare world he’d potentially planted himself in in which Richie harbors nothing but toleration for him, and she says, “He likes you. I’m sure of it, actually.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. His voice is meek not because he is still doubtful (though he surely is, and some part of him might always cling to that doubt) but because the sheer weight of Beverly’s words has struck him. And Richie’s still looking. Eddie can feel it.

Eddie puts it to the test - both what Beverly had said and his own dignity - in Richie’s car. Richie drives while Eddie sits in the passenger seat, looking at him, listening to every word he says and soaking it up like it’s the last time he’ll ever have the pleasure of hearing his voice. Suddenly, Richie interrupts his own anecdote with a question. His eyes dart to Eddie briefly, unsure and almost uncomfortable, if Eddie reads it right, before he spits it out with false nonchalance. “What were you and Bev whispering about?”

Eddie sits up a little straighter, rolls his shoulders back a little further, and doesn’t take his eyes off of Richie. Richie’s not looking at him, so he could look away if he wanted to.  _ But it doesn’t count if I don’t see his reactions.  _ “You.”

“Me?” Richie raises his eyebrows, genuine surprise coloring his expression. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Would you hold my hand again?” Eddie says all in one breath. It takes everything out of him to say it. He lets it come out with the same inflection that he’d say  _ do you love me too _ if he was brave enough to say that. “Like you did at that diner. Remember? Would you do that again?”

Richie freezes. He blinks a couple times and seems to bring himself back down close enough to the ground that he can answer the question. Eddie’s stomach twists and untwists and then twists again at the soft, low sound of Richie’s voice when he says, simply and warmly, “‘Course.”

And he does. Actually. In real life, things actually play out the way they’ve played out in only the wildest of Eddie’s dreams. Richie takes one hand off the wheel and lays it palm up on the console, as simple as that, and Eddie looks on in awe for a moment. He picks up his hand, places his index finger at the base of Richie’s wrist, and trails it slowly up Richie’s palm before intertwining his soft hand with Richie’s calloused one. Richie’s fingers twitch before he tightens his grip.

Eddie lifts his head to stare at Richie. It’s painful to not be looking at their hands, locked together in the privacy of Richie’s car where nobody can say shit about it, but it hurts more to not look at Richie’s face.

“Like that?” Richie asks, squeezing Eddie’s hand again. His eyes are on the road, so Eddie can’t see his whole face clearly, but the blush on his face seems ravenous, like it aims to tint every inch of Richie’s skin pink.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Just like that.”

Richie’s car stays quiet, but it’s like the two of them depend on one another’s silence in order to feel comfortable in their own. It’s a safe silence. Nothing like the one Eddie is undoubtedly going to walk into when Richie drops him off at his house.

“So you do know,” Richie says, speaking through a smile that he tries to hide.

Eddie doesn’t know that he  _ knows _ anything, but he knows that he definitely  _ feels _ something. “Sure.”

“Do you  _ want _ to go home?” Richie asks then, like he hadn’t asked the previous question at all. Eddie withholds a sigh. “Or do you wanna do something, go somewhere? Get something to eat maybe.”

_ Is this a date? Say yes.  _ “Whatever you wanna do.”

“What I don’t wanna do is drop you off at your house, so food it is.”

It’s pitch black outside. If Eddie gets home a second later than right now, his mom might break her streak of silence and go berzerk on him, but Richie’s holding his hand and they might be going on a date. Eddie’s very first date  _ ever.  _ So she can wait.

“Is anything even open right now?”

“We’ll find somewhere,” Richie says resolutely, like he’s already got a place in mind.

“Not if everything’s closed, we won’t.”

“Trust me.”

“I do,” Eddie says. He squeezes Richie’s hand to prove his point.

Richie makes a sharp turn and pulls into the cozy parking lot of a diner Eddie has never been to before. “You know this place?” Richie asks him, already knowing Eddie’s answer. 

“No. Is it good?”

“Good?  _ Fantastic _ .” 

The floors both match and clash with Richie’s shirt - same black and white hues on the tiles as the striped pattern Richie’s wearing. That’s the first thing Eddie notices when he steps into the quaint little building. There’s only six or seven tables in the whole place, and it’s lit so dimly that Eddie, in any other situation, would insist it’s sketchy and demand they leave. There’s a neon sign that reads  _ menu _ in cursive writing, but the only letter that isn’t flickering on and off is the U. 

There’s a bar with a few stools set up, a view that leads straight to the stoves and the fridge rolling out beyond the edge of the counter. Eddie’s about to stake a claim on the stool in the corner closest to the wall, but Richie presses the tips of his fingers to Eddie’s lower back and guides him in the opposite direction.

“No, no, no,” he murmurs into Eddie’s ear, leaning close enough that Eddie can  _ feel _ Richie’s voice humming against the junction between his neck and shoulder. Breathless and immediately ten times more pliant, Eddie allows Richie to nudge him towards a square table at the back of the room, where he practically trips into his seat, swatting Richie’s hand off his back without even realizing he’s done it. Richie plops down opposite him, unbothered, folding his hands in front of him. The first signs of a nervous smile spread on Richie’s face before he kills it immediately. He whips around to look for a waiter. 

Watching Richie purse his lips and crane his neck, all Eddie’s thinking is  _ God, I wanna kiss you _ . And then not too long after that, he’s wondering when the  _ fuck _ his feelings for Richie got so invasive and consuming and  _ annoying _ . He doesn’t realize he’s bouncing his leg until Richie reaches underneath the table and grabs his knee, ceasing the movement.

“You’re shaking the whole table, babe,” Richie says without looking away from where he’s staring - at a single employee, the only one in the entire place that seems to be on shift. Eddie has to lean back in his chair to keep from exploding at the pet name.

“Natalie,” Richie calls. The waitress, standing behind the counter tapping away at her phone, smacks her gum and looks up. Ah.  _ ‘Fantastic,’ huh?  _ Eddie thinks.  _ I wonder why.  _ The girl - Natalie - drops her phone face-down on the counter and beams at Richie, kicking off of the counter and snatching up a pad of paper. A pen hangs precariously from the pocket of her stripey uniform shirt. It looks as if it might give up and clatter to the ground as she rounds the corner of the counter, her pale blonde ponytail bouncing at the top of her head. Eddie pouts as she approaches, her eyes grazing right over him to land on an exceptionally pleased Richie. 

“Back again, I see,” Natalie chirps, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Eddie knows it’s petty and ridiculous to hate the sound of her voice just because it might be verging on flirty, but he does. Unfair as it may be, considering Beverly talks the same way to Richie and Eddie doesn’t give half a shit, Eddie looks her up and down with disdain before he forces his eyes dart to every other direction except for Richie and this Natalie girl, on a mission to avoid the sight of them together. “And you’ve brought a friend. Is this Eds?”

Mission aborted. Eddie snaps his eyes to her clear blue ones, and she offers a friendly smile. “Eddie,” he corrects her, voice low and sour. She retracts. He narrows his eyes at Richie, who shrugs and bats his eyelashes like it’s nothing out of the ordinary. At the sight of Richie’s dark eyes regarding him, Eddie is reminded of the warmth accumulated at the small of his back, the faint ghost of Richie’s hand still present. The same warmth creeps up the palm of his hand.

Eddie ducks his head and looks back up at Natalie. She  _ is _ quite pretty, he decides, so maybe if Richie says he likes her, it won’t be too far fetched. He’s mentally preparing himself for it now, for Richie to lean over the table the second Natalie walks off and whisper about how beautiful and sweet and funny and  _ perfect _ she is, and Eddie will just nod and agree and let Richie go on and on about it while he disintegrates and turns to ash. 

“Eds, do you wanna share a plate or do you want your own?” Richie asks, shifting his eyes from Natalie back to Eddie.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He shuts his eyes, embarrassed, and sputters out, “Yes to sharing. I’m not that hungry.” Through Richie’s laughter, he mumbles something to Natalie before Eddie hears the soft tap of her feet against the checkered tiles. When she’s far enough out of earshot, Eddie opens his eyes again, transfixed on Richie. 

“Someone’s a little jealous, huh?” Richie teases. “Natalie’s a friend. Used to go to Derry High. She dropped out when she had her baby. You don’t remember?”

Eddie  _ does _ remember, actually, and now that he thinks about it, he’s not really making any sense. Richie held his hand. Richie just clarified that she's just a friend, implying that Eddie  _ isn't  _ just a friend, that he's something more. That’s gotta mean something, right? 

Richie wouldn't be careless like that because Richie cares about things. 

_ Richie cares about me. Like that. Like I care about him, I think. _

_ Maybe. _

  
  
  


It’s a Friday in the first week of July, late at night, when Eddie’s phone starts ringing loud and clear from where he’s left it on his nightstand. He grabs for it hastily, hurrying to accept the call and shivering at the thought of his mother bursting in to ask him who had dared to contact him at such an ungodly hour of night. “Whoever this is, I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.”

“It’s Richie. What, you don’t have me saved in your contacts?” Eddie breathes out a sigh of relief and of exasperation all in one.

“You know I do. Just wouldn’t expect you to call this late considering you’ve met my wonderful guardian.” Richie laughs on the other side of the call, a muffled sound, as Eddie flips his covers over and stands up, flattening his messy hair down. “You outside?” he asks.

“I am, actually. Out front. Come get in the car.”

Eddie jumps out of his skin and turns around swiftly, hissing at Richie over the phone as he stares daggers into the air. “What the fuck do you mean _come get in the car_? Hello, check your fucking phone, because you have _Eddie_ _Kaspbrak_ on the line. Also known as the little boy locked up in the tower once the clock strikes six-thirty?”

“I think you’ve got your fairytales mixed up there, babe. And I know who I called. Only one person in my phone with the contact name  _ loverboy,  _ so get your ass down here. Your mom’s still heated, right? So we’re home free. And we’ve gotta talk. Like, now.” 

Eddie sighs. He won’t argue - he’s already putting on his shoes. “Is that really my name in your phone?”

“Has been since sophomore year. Hurry up before your mom wakes up and jumps me.” Richie hangs up then, and he leaves Eddie with a heart that leaps from his chest, onto the floor, and skitters out the door and into Richie’s arms before Eddie gets a chance to.

Richie is wearing a denim jacket despite the fact that it’s summer, which is the first thing Eddie notices. The second thing he notices is that Richie has a clump of bloody tissues in his hands.

“Not this shit again, Richie,” Eddie warns. “I thought you were done with this. I thought you were gonna stop.”

“I didn’t fight back this time,” Richie says, and his voice is so sickeningly somber that Eddie’s stomach drops to the floor. Richie opens the car door for him and leaves it open as he rushes to the driver’s side, still holding the wad of tissues in his fist with a ferocity Eddie hasn’t seen anymore. Eddie wonders for a second if he’s high, if Richie’s done some  _ real _ drugs, the kind that people like Henry Bowers and his friends might sell. The kind that could get Richie in jail for a long time. The kind that could get Eddie in jail for being in the car with Richie while he’s on them.

Richie beats him to the punch as he starts the car. “Yes, I can drive just fine, because no, I am not under the influence of  _ anything.  _ I wish I was.” Richie’s voice is suddenly stern, sharp. It pierces Eddie’s ears in a way that encourages him to stay silent and nod his head. Richie slams the door and the car takes off down Eddie’s street.

They don’t say anything on the drive to wherever, not even when Richie turns onto some weird dirt road that he seems to know disturbingly well, and not even when they end up at the back of Richie’s house in a much shorter time than it normally should take and park on the side of the road. Then, Richie turns to him.

“My nose was bleeding,” Richie says, quiet now, gentle in his tone and the way he lets his eyes regard Eddie, wandering over his entire form. His voice is brittle. Eddie thinks that Richie might break. 

“When did it stop?” Eddie asks. He’s much calmer now that Richie has stopped moving so fast and using such a clipped tone with him, but the fact that he’s wearing Richie’s old t-shirt and a pair of worn flannels pants as pajamas gives him this nagging self-consciousness. He crosses his arms over his chest.

“Like, two minutes before I called you. That’s not the point.”

Richie looks up at his house, so Eddie does, too. All the windows are dark and as far as Eddie can see, nobody’s parked in the driveway.

“Get in the backseat,” Richie says out of nowhere. Eddie obliges before Richie offers a sliver of an explanation. “Windows are tinted back there. If my folks come home, they won’t see us.”

Richie follows him back there, settling on the opposite side of the bench seat with his knees tucked up under his chin and his skinny arms wrapped around them. The bloody tissue is discarded on the floor of the car. Eddie winces at the sight of it, but he makes himself look at Richie. He’s got this horrible sick feeling in the pit of his  _ everything _ , like something just isn’t right. Something’s just off.

“Look, it’s not a big deal, Eds, if you say no,” Richie starts, inhaling before he starts every sentence like all the oxygen in the world wouldn’t be enough for him to get it all out. “But when I asked if you’d stay here if I couldn’t go with you to New York… did you think about it at all?”

Eddie hesitates. In this hesitation, Richie’s face falls, all the hope draining out of him. “You know I would. I just. It’s gonna be hard. With my mom and everything--”

“Fuck your mom. We can do whatever we want.”

“You, of all people, should know it isn’t that simple, Richie.” Eddie flattens his back against the door and tightens his arms against his chest, hoping subconsciously that maybe if he tries hard enough the squeezing will slow his heartbeat. He sighs. “When I get to New York, it all goes away. This town, my mother, and every other prick who made my life a living hell while I lived here.”

Richie shrugs. “And me.”

“I’ll take you with me in a carry-on case if I have to.”

An echo of a smile turns up the corners of Richie’s mouth for a split second. “I don’t know if I’ll fit.”

“I’ll make you fit. You’re coming.”

Richie laughs - it’s a sad laugh - and shakes his head. “You ever realize how in love with me you sound sometimes?”

“Whatever,” Eddie huffs at the same time that his mind screams  _ because I am, you fucking idiot. _

“I’m not going to college, Eddie.”

The words shatter everything. Eddie thinks for a millisecond of what this means for them, for him, for Richie, and he wants to collapse on the road outside of the car and lie there until something proves to him that he doesn’t have to think about it anymore. “Why the fuck not?” he snaps, much harsher than he intends.

Richie gulps and blinks and then does it again and again until he decides that Eddie’s pressing stare is too much for him. “My mom, my dad. They, uh. You know, they don’t like the whole acting thing. They think it’s cushy and I’ll fail and that I’m just not good enough. I’m not fuckin’ Leo DiCaprio or anything, I’m just not like that. I’m just not that good. I’m not getting into any big name movies or some shit. So they want me to be a dentist. Like my dad. Make some honest money, some real, reliable money and provide for a nice, white picket fence family. But who fucking  _ wants _ to be a dentist, you know, Eds?”

“You are good enough, though. I think you’re amazing. Everyone does.”

“Not everyone, Eddie. So I went behind their backs,” Richie says. He pauses then, bites on his lip real hard, and Eddie’s worried he might draw up more blood. “I went behind their backs and I applied to all these schools that I could go to for acting. I figured, so what if they won’t pay for it? So what if I go into debt? I’ll be doing what I want. What I love, what I care about.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. It’s a pointless addition, but he wants to make sure he can get words out. Things are starting to click for him. Really, really click.

“So I did that. And I thought I’d hear back. Fucking valedictorian, lead in every school play, who doesn’t want a kid like that on their roster? Jesus fucking Christ. Anyway. Long story short, Eddie, none of them ever got mailed. I put them in the mailbox. But they never got mailed.”

Eddie stares at Richie in a silence so still and quiet that it’s questionable if there’s even a breath of air left for either of them to grasp onto. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

Richie shrugs. “Wish I was.”

“Apply again, then. If that’s the case, I’ll take a gap year. I’ll stay. Whatever you want. I don’t care, whatever you want,” Eddie says, feeling his chest empty with the weight of his words, growing lighter by the second. His stomach winds itself into a tight knot.

He knows how this all sounds, like he’s begging - which he is, indisputably. Like he’s in love with Richie - which he is. Indisputably. 

“I want you to be there.” Deep breath, sharp inhale, long exhale.  _ I don’t care anymore. _ “I want you.”

There is a long pause. “What are you talking about?” Richie says, but he knows. He knows.

Quietly, urgently, Eddie says, “You  _ know _ what I’m talking about.”

The backseat of Richie’s car seems fitting for this hidden confession, almost like way back when Richie had dragged Eddie along with him to the used car dealership in town and pointed this particular van out in the back corner of the lot, it had been intended for this exact moment. Like every time Eddie had called Richie up asking for a ride somewhere, or yearning for a ride to nowhere in particular, it’d been adding up to right now. Eddie knows that’s a ridiculous notion. He knows Richie hasn’t felt the way he appears to feel now - all soft eyes and pink cheeks and shy glances - for as long as Eddie has felt it towards him.

But nonetheless, something had been leading up to this. A thread, invisible and floating in the universe somewhere, stitches together that very first day, the day Richie asked to borrow Eddie’s red crayon and Eddie had thrown it across the room and told him to  _ go fetch  _ and Richie had laughed until his cheeks flushed pink, the day at the quarry when Eddie had cried and cried and cried and Richie had held him and held him and held him, the day that Eddie had finally admitted to himself that he loved and was  _ in _ love with Richie Tozier and had a good, deep, terrified cry about that too, the day when Richie had grabbed his hand and Eddie’s skin had been on fire and his heart had been in shambles in the very best way, and Richie hadn’t been ashamed or scared to make sure Eddie  _ knew _ . All connected to the moment Eddie leans forward, grabs Richie on either side of his blushy face and presses their lips together.

Richie yanks himself away. Fear so cold and searing that it burns shoots through every vein in Eddie’s body. Richie’s breath comes out in a short gasp when he says, “You’re kissing me? And you want to? You actually  _ want _ to be kissing me?” Eddie nods, relief washing the fear away. Of course he wants to.  _ Of course I want to. _ “Wish you woulda let me go for it instead,” Richie says, a laidback smile creeping onto his face.

Eddie gears up to roll his eyes and brush it off but Richie rushes forward and kisses him again, cradling his face gently between his huge hands, pushing so far forward that Eddie’s head smacks against the window. Richie tugs away to apologize, but Eddie leans into him, trapping Richie’s lips between his own.  _ I love you _ , Eddie thinks. Richie smiles like he hears it, making it all the more difficult for Eddie to keep their mouths glued together. He takes the opportunity to do what he’s seen people do in movies a thousand times over, what he’s read in books even more often, and deepens the kiss, slipping his tongue into Richie’s open mouth. Richie makes a noise and disconnects their lips with a laugh.

“Jesus Christ,” he laughs, a hand flying up to ghost over his bottom lip. Like he can’t believe it, can’t fathom the reality of it. Eddie doesn’t shy away from Richie or cower in the corner of the car and order him to get back up front and drive and pretend this never happened, because he knows Richie isn’t laughing at him. He isn’t laughing at anything at all, really. Voice down low as if someone is waiting nearby to pounce if they hear the words, Richie says, “How long have you wanted to do that?”

Embarrassment overcomes Eddie. He coughs out a laugh to delay his answer, but with Richie’s eyes on every inch of him, he can’t help but answer honestly. “Six years.”

“No fucking way.” Eddie gives a minute nod, gauging Richie’s reaction. Richie won’t look away from him. “No fucking  _ way. _ ” Eddie nods again and bursts out laughing at Richie’s incredulous expression, eyebrows raised and eyes wide, bugging out cartoonishly behind his askew glasses. “I didn’t even know I liked you until sophomore year because, you know, sometimes I’m a little slow with these things and-- you bitch, oh my God, you absolute bitch, if you would’ve just  _ told  _ me, I could’ve had the cutest fucking boy in town on my arm. And I could’ve been spared from the virgin jokes for the last couple years to top it all off. You robbed me of everything I deserved.”

“I wouldn’t have fucked you.” Why Eddie’s still spouting lies without even thinking twice like that, he doesn’t know, and the idea of responding to anything else Richie had said is too overwhelming.

They hit Eddie hard, Richie’s words. Sophomore year, he’d said.  _ Loverboy _ . Huh.

“Pfft. Bullshit. Yeah, you would’ve.” Eddie looks away, rolling his eyes and ducking his head so his blush is out of Richie’s view. “Kiss me again.” The sound of those words coming from Richie’s mouth sends a shiver up Eddie’s spine, tensing his shoulders. Against his better judgement, he lifts his gaze to stare at Richie from beneath his lashes. Richie is chewing on his bottom lip, his fingers still drawn to his mouth and tracing the outline of it, regarding Eddie with a faint smile. His wondrous eyes catch Eddie’s in a flash.

Eddie inhales sharply. “Only if you say please.” He isn’t serious. They both know this. But something needs to ground him, to prove this is real.

Richie scoffs because he  _ knows _ it's bullshit and that Eddie would kiss him again if it meant it would be the last thing he'd ever do . Then, without further prompting, he whispers, “Please.” He reaches forward to rest his hand on Eddie’s thigh, the other one coming to hold Eddie’s cheek in his hand. There’s heat everywhere, and it’s like they’re meant to do this. Like they’ve just been flirting and touching and kissing and  _ being _ for years. “Eddie.” 

And that’s enough for Eddie. Without another word, his lips meet Richie’s, not thinking twice before he fists a hand in Richie’s hair. Richie elicits the smallest grunting noise, a hum of satisfaction, and the hand on Eddie’s leg presses down hard into his skin.Weight shifts, the hand on Eddie’s thigh disappears and is replaced with Richie’s thigh, his legs placed on either side of Eddie’s without disconnecting their mouths once in his maneuver. Having no idea what to do with his other hand, Eddie places his palm flat against Richie’s chest, but it soon finds its own path to cup the side of Richie’s neck. Richie grins into his mouth, lets out a breathy laugh, eyes fluttering open momentarily. Eddie tugs him in again. Louder this time, Richie hums into his mouth.

Richie’s hand falls from Eddie’s cheek and his fingers wind around the collar of his shirt, pulling him impossibly nearer. Richie keeps laughing, short giggly bursts every time their lips separate. Eddie silences them each time. “What is so  _ funny?” _ Eddie says, pulling his face just as far as is necessary for him to speak. Richie pecks his lips.

“I don’t know,” Richie says. He ventures for another peck to Eddie’s lips, and Eddie’s heart pounds against his ribcage, his whole body a enveloped in a glowy warmth. “I think I’m just really happy?” Another peck.

“Because of this?”

“Obviously.”

_ Holy fucking shit. _

It goes on like that forever, them kissing and talking and then forgetting that they're kissing and talking and that it's  _ actually _ happening. It doesn't stop for so long that Eddie thinks he's stuck in a dream. He's pretty okay with it.

They only stop because there's the sound of car tires on gravel and there's headlights grazing over Richie's window, and Richie sits up straight as a board. “Get back in the front,” he pants. He uses a hand on Eddie's shoulder to push him towards the passenger seat, wide eyes trained on the car pulling into his driveway. “I'm so fucking dead.”

Eddie plops down into the passenger seat and leans back against it, staring up at the car's ceiling. Okay, so not a dream. He's really breathing this hard and he can really still feel Richie's hands on his face and his sides and his legs and it's kind of hot, actually, hearing Richie breathe just as heavy as he climbs up into the driver's side.

“I'm gonna take you back to your place, but I can't stay. I'm in deep shit, Eds. Wasn't even supposed to leave at all tonight.” A pang of guilt hits Eddie, and Richie must clock it immediately, because he leans over the console to kiss him again, quicker and far messier and more intense than before, not even bothering to let Eddie realize he's kissing him before Richie separates for a moment to look at Eddie’s face for what seems like decades. When he pulls away, Eddie gravitates towards him, stuck in Richie's orbit, before it settles in that the kiss is done. “Not that I regret it. I don't. I really,  _ really _ don't.”

“Good,” Eddie says. It's all he can think to say. It's all his brain can process.  _ Good, good, good. This is good. So good. _

“And I'll come by tomorrow night. Okay?” Richie says. The car roars to life and they're shooting down the street. Eddie is staring at Richie. He doesn't really care how fast they go. The car can crash and burn, for all he cares. This is the best day of his entire life (and worst, too, maybe, but he cannot physically bring himself to think about Richie's dreadful announcement right now when all of the _other stuff_ could be filling up his brain instead).

“Please do,” Eddie says, not caring how desperate and childish he sounds.

Richie grins. He's still tense, but Eddie seems to be calming him somehow - his shoulders are relaxed and his eyes aren't flickering around the road, waiting for something to leap out in front of them. He touches Eddie's hand. Eddie grabs his, locks it up in a tight grasp.

_ He really does like me then, huh? _

“‘Cause you’d like it if I came over, right, Eds?” Richie teases. “Because you want me?”

“Because I want you,” Eddie says with a smile, basking in the freeing feeling of saying it out loud. He imagines that Richie is also thinking  _ he really does like me then, huh? _ and his heart skips a beat.

Richie kisses him fiercely one more time when they're in Eddie's driveway, and Eddie wants to stay in the moment forever. But before he knows it, he's just sitting up in his bedroom and thinking about it, replaying it over and over again in his head.

He texts Bev. Out of instinct. She knows so much already, so what's the difference?

_ I MADE OUT WITH RICHIE AND IM NOT KIDDING AND HE ALSO KISSED ME BACK GOODNIGHT BEVERLY I LOVE YOU _

Perfect.

Richie texts him goodnight just a few minutes later. He includes the lipstick print emoji, which Eddie knows means he’s trying to tease him, so he formulates a reply fairly quickly.

_ gn u suck _

**rich:** _ i sure do _

**rich:** _ ;D _

_ wow good one _

**rich:** _ ikr _

The night is excruciating. Sleeping is an impossible task. Closing his eyes means that he immediately travels back to the last time that his eyes had been closed, which had been the very same night when the person he’s loved for a third of his life had kissed him… a lot. Wow.

It takes Eddie the majority of the time between Richie’s departure and morning to process that he is, in fact, fully awake and functioning. He survives the day not on a good night’s sleep, but on a healthy mix of excitement and coffee. He thinks about Richie when he sits in the living room and stares at the TV. He thinks about Richie when Stan calls him and asks him if he still has his old blue shorts, to which Eddie responds with a no and a long silence where he wants to start screaming. He thinks about Richie when Beverly texts him back (all she had said was  _ what? _ followed by  _ you’re kidding _ and the grand finale,  _ call me rn _ ). He thinks about Richie when his mother finally speaks to him. Because she speaks about Richie.

“You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with him, Eddie,” she says. Her voice is cold. It drips with falsified concern. Eddie hates her so much.

“Because I’m in love with him,” Eddie answers plainly. Only today would he have the will to say something like that. He expects he’ll be dead by the next morning, but that doesn’t really matter because Richie is coming  _ tonight _ . His mom walks away without responding. Eddie couldn’t really care less.

And thank God, his obsessive waiting and thinking and chugging of coffee pays off.

Richie keeps his word. The following night, he’s at Eddie’s house, tossing pebbles at his bedroom window like they’re in a shitty twentieth century romantic comedy that Richie would hate. Eddie bounds toward the window at lightning speed to hold it open.

“Hi,” he breathes out when he comes face to face with Richie, finally releasing his impatience into the air.

“Hey,” Richie answers with a grin. He climbs in, trips over his untied shoes and grabs onto Eddie’s arm for support. “Lifesaver.”

“You’re telling me.”

They sit on Eddie’s bed, and everything gets quiet.  _ Oh. _ Eddie hadn’t really prepared for something like this. For silence, thick and awkward, to swaddle them up and leave them alone in the dark with their expectations for how things would be on the other side of an impromptu makeout session. Eddie looks to Richie for a joke, a comment, something, but Richie is looking at him, seemingly for the same thing. They both look away.

“So,” Eddie says at the same time that Richie blurts, “Last night was good for me.”

He doesn’t wait for Eddie’s approval to continue, because he knows he has it by the way he captures Eddie’s attention instantly. “I mean,” Richie corrects, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath as he gathers his thoughts. “I mean that I’m glad it happened. It was good.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says.

He waits for the inevitable  _ but _ . Nothing comes. Instead, Richie says, “Like, I’m  _ really  _ glad. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie repeats.  _ Snap out of it.  _ “Yeah, me too.”

“And I don’t want things to be weird.”

“Right.”  _  Here it comes. ‘We’re best friends, Eddie, we can’t ruin that no matter how good last night may have been.’ Wait for it. _

“But I also don’t want there to…  _ not _ be more of that. That’s weird, right? To think like that? We went so long without, you know,  _ that. _ But I can’t think of us not doing  _ that _ anymore.”  _ Oh… or not.  _ Richie laughs in spite of himself, clinging to a tangible hope that Eddie will understand what he means. And Eddie  _ does. _ More than he’d care to admit. He can’t think about living another second of a life where he can’t kiss Richie now that he’s had his fair share.

“So let’s do that.” 

Richie smiles, slow at first, but it rises to a full grin, breaking their gaze by glancing around Eddie’s bedroom without wiping that stupid expression off his face. He looks around like he’s trying to assure himself of where he is.

“Let’s do that. Right now,” Eddie says. Richie’s grin falls and he looks right at Eddie, who doesn’t let his front waver.  _ Seriously, Richie. Just fucking kiss me. _

Richie does.  _ Hard _ . Like he’s starving for it. Eddie can  _ feel _ it in the way that they kiss that neither of them can imagine a time in the future where this isn’t an option, one where they don’t fit together just like this. Richie pushes Eddie onto his back and pulls away to breathe, but only for seconds at a time, because Eddie can’t stop grabbing his collar to yank him back in, his other hand fisted tightly in the fabric by Richie’s hip, pulling the hem up towards his chest.

“Eddie,” Richie says, pulling far enough away that Eddie can see him, can’t reach the neckline of his shirt to pull him back in. “Eddie. You’re a  _ lot _ , baby.”

A sharp inhale is the only thing that keeps Eddie from  “You can’t just call me that when you’re all the way over there. Richie, you can’t,” Eddie says. It’s embarrassingly whiny, but Richie grins at the sound, blushing profusely. He leans in again, lets Eddie claw at him and bring his entire torso down flush against his own before he even shuts his eyes to kiss him on his open mouth again.

“Take it off,” Eddie demands, pulling his hands up away from Richie's shirts to grab him on either side of his face and look at him, flushed cheeks and wide eyes and all.

“Take my shirt off?”

Eddie nods. “Take it off.”

“I don't want you to do anything you don't think you wanna do yet, Eddie,” Richie says. He's obliging to Eddie's orders as he continues to speak, unbuttoning the shirt as fast as his fingers can manage. He's breathing heavily and is still leaning over Eddie, their faces practically nose to nose. “Okay? I'm serious. Just because you think I want to - which I do--”

“You do?” Eddie asks, softer now.

“ _ Obviously _ I do,” Richie says. He says it the same way he'd say the color of the sky or his first name. “I was thinking about it today. In between thinking about other things. My mind wanders. You know me. And I thought about it before then, too. Couple years now that it's been on my mind..”

“Hot. That's really hot,” Eddie murmurs (it's really more of a sigh or a pant, because he can't breathe at all right now). He pushes Richie's shirt sleeves down the length his arms so that Richie can shake it off at the wrists, bathing in the look Richie gives him, one of interest and attraction, one he's never seen before. Richie bites back a smile, proud of whatever he thinks he may have done to elicit such a comment out of Eddie. 

“But not today,” Eddie finishes. They’re going too quickly - Eddie thinks they’ve skipped a couple steps between first kiss and this, and he knows how badly he’s wanted this, how long he’s waited, but he wants everything to be real and slow. Genuine. “Too fast. Too soon. Later.”  _ Please know that I mean it. Seriously. Later. _

“I can wait,” Richie says just before he dives into another kiss. Eddie believes him.

Eddie cannot believe this is happening. He's half-expecting to wake up in a cold sweat, humiliated and hoping that he doesn't have to see Richie later that day and face the reminder of his dream. Except he can feel Richie's skin, all of it now, his back and his arms and his chest up against him, and it doesn't  _ feel _ fake. It feels warm and smooth and like he'd hoped it would every time he thought of a moment like this.

Richie pulls away again. Eddie loves and hates that they do this. Neither of them can shut the fuck up long enough to  _ kiss _ , for fuck's sake.

“This is a  _ lot _ ,” Richie says, repeating his earlier statement. “Not in a bad way. Just never thought you'd be this bossy.”

Eddie shrugs. He rests his hands on Richie’s upper arms. “Never thought that if I was bossy, you'd be so quick to listen.”

“That's not fair.”

“Whipped.”

“That's really,  _ really  _ fair, actually.” Richie leans in again and it's messier than before, but neither of them really care all that much. 

  
  
  


It takes three days of radio silence for Eddie to pick up Beverly’s phone calls.

“So you just facefuck Richie and think you can get away with just a dumb text and without  _ telling me everything _ , you fucking bastard?” is her opening line. Eddie thinks for the first time about how he’s got to leave her, too, when he goes off to college. His chest tightens, but he coughs it out and waits for Bev to speak again. “You’re a bitch, Eddie Kaspbrak, but I’ll forgive you just this once. Tell me what happened.”

“I dunno. We were talking. I kissed him first.”

“ _ You kissed him first. _ ”

“I kissed him first,” Eddie repeats back to her, grinning from ear to ear. He can’t quite believe it either.  _ Someone call middle school Eddie and tell him the news. _

“And?” Beverly urges. “What happened? Did he spit on you and call you gay?” There’s mock sympathy in her tone as she says it, a poutiness to her words that makes the joke all the more funny. Eddie grins even wider. He swears someday his lips are gonna split at the corners and it’s gonna be all Beverly’s fault.

“Yeah, a few times, actually,” Eddie laughs. “It was pretty hot. I liked it a lot.”

“Ha. But really, though. What happened?”

“I mean,” Eddie says, blushing profusely and standing from the edge of his bed to pace his room. “I don’t know. Like, really, I just don’t know. It was really sweet, but also really…  _ you know _ . He kept thinking I wasn’t serious, like I was gonna waste my first kiss on a mean joke, and his lips were really soft. Surprising because he doesn’t use chapstick. And he put his hand on my leg. His hands are, like, really big, Beverly.”

“You know what they say about big hands,” Beverly says.

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie laughs. “And then the next night, there was more. Of all of that. Less sweet.”

“Oh my God,” Beverly laughs softly into the phone. Then she pauses, considers something. She says it.

“You tell him you love him?”

Eddie stifles a bit at that. His voice is quiet now, shy. “Not in so many words. I’m sure he knows. I’ll say it eventually, but I don’t think there’s a doubt in anyone’s mind that I do.”

Another pause. “I think you guys are perfect for each other.”

Eddie misses her already.

  
  
  


“I wish we would’ve gotten-- I wish we could’ve been like  _ this _ while we were still in school,” Richie says against Eddie’s lips, which are swollen and kissed red. He’s careful with the way he phrases it - anything to keep the word  _ together _ from stumbling out in the open on accident. Eddie’s stomach churns up a fierce wave of butterflies, and he feels dumb for feeling a flood of such childish emotion. “Would’ve showed you off.”

“To who?”

“To everyone.”

“Yeah?” Eddie says. His breathing is so shallow that he’s surprised he’s still alive, and it doesn’t help that now he has to think about the idea of Richie being proud to have him by his side while Richie is  _ literally  _ hovering inches away from his face.

“Yeah,” Richie answers. His hand comes up to Eddie’s face and he lets his thumb dance across Eddie’s bottom lip. “You’re cute.”

Eddie can’t think. His head goes a little fuzzy. “Okay,” he says. “You’re good at this.”

“At what?”

“Talking.”

Richie grins. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“No, I mean… talking like  _ that.”  _

“I’m just telling you what I’m thinking, Eds. That’s all.” Richie smiles again, more teasing than anything. “Why, you can’t do it? Haven’t you got anything nice to say about your dear old pal Richie?”

“ _ Please, _ ” Eddie laughs, and is surprised but delighted to see that Richie’s smile widens at the sound. “You wish I didn’t. There’s too many things. If I get started I won’t ever stop.”

“Okay. One thing,” Richie says. The hand on the side of Eddie’s waist tightens a little bit, pulls him upwards and closer to Richie. “Tell me one.”

Eddie thinks about it for a moment, considers his options. All the things he could spit out rapidfire in response overwhelm him. “If I don’t, will you bug me about it?”

Richie shrugs one shoulder and leans in a little more, close enough to Eddie’s face that Eddie can’t try to follow Richie’s lips with his eyes. Richie does it just to be an asshole, really, but when he talks again, Eddie can feel Richie’s lips brush against his skin. Eddie instinctively tilts his chin up. “I might,” Richie says. “I might not. You never know with me. I’m unpredictable. Is that something you like about me, Eddie? Hm?”

“God, you’re annoying,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes and shoving Richie’s face away jokingly. “I’ll tell you. But just one thing for now, okay? I’m not gonna embarrass myself.”

“That’d be really cute, though, if you did.”

“ _ Richie _ .”

“Fine, fine. I’m listening.”

_ Make it a good one.  _ Richie’s looking at Eddie’s face, at his lips, at his eyes, waiting expectantly and patiently as he waits for Eddie to speak. Eddie closes the gap between them to kiss Richie briefly. Just because he can. 

The pause carries on for what feels like an entire lifetime. Eddie knows for sure that Richie won’t laugh at him or get some twisted, disgusted look on his face and storm off, so he feels safe enough to speak, but something in his gut twists inexplicably with nerves. He swallows his discomfort. He looks at Richie’s eyes, so close to his that it’s hard to focus in on them, and he speaks. “I like that you’re here. In general, I mean, not just right now. I like that you’re everywhere. I think about you more often than I breathe. And I’d stay in Derry for the rest of my life if it meant you’d keep kissing me like you did in your car and in my room the other night.”

Richie doesn’t say anything for a while, but he goes completely still, his hand still warm and firm on Eddie’s side and the fingers that had been tracing his mouth earlier resting lightly at the base of his throat. Eddie’s sure, then, that Richie can feel him swallow roughly as he awaits an answer, anything at all that might qualify as some degree of a response.

“Richie,” Eddie prompts. Richie blinks a couple times, shifts his weight beside Eddie some more so he’s leaning onto him. But he still doesn’t say anything. “Was that too much?” Eddie asks tentatively. “Did I make it weird?”

“No,” Richie says. “No, it wasn’t too much. I just, uh. Wow.” Warmth pools in Eddie’s stomach, comfort filling him to the brim at the sound of Richie’s voice. “I think that’s the best thing anyone’s ever said to me, Eddie,” he whispers. “I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s not at all the reaction he’d prepared for - at most, he’d expected Richie to maybe blush and roll his eyes and make a stupid comment, but now he’s looking dead at him with this gooey expression on his face, and the pale spaces in between his freckles are littered with a rosy color, and Eddie’s heart is beating so,  _ so  _ fast.

“I guess I’ve got a lot more where that came from,” Eddie says with a laugh that isn’t really a laugh but more of a filler sound, something to keep the words together and coherent and prevent him from choking on the feeling that arises when he looks at Richie. It’s more intense than it’s ever been. And it’s accompanied by the feeling that bubbles up when Richie’s eyes dart downwards, a question hidden in them, and jump to every inch of Eddie’s skin before they land on his mouth.

“I wanna kiss you so bad right now, Eds. Can I?”

“Don’t ask,” Eddie says, and his hand flies up before he’s even done speaking to take hold in Richie’s hair and pull his face down the few inches necessary to let their lips meet.

  
  
  


Two days later, Eddie is in Richie’s room again. He’s wearing one of Richie’s favorite shirts, a vertically striped one with some weird skater brand logo embroidered into the front, and it’s swallowing up his whole frame but Richie says he likes it on him, so he wears it anyway. Every now and then he glances up from his phone and looks over Richie’s shoulder at the game that he’s playing, giggling every time Richie loses, earning him a quick shove in the opposite direction so that he can’t see his screen anymore.

Eddie’s on Instagram. Beverly texts him.

**beverly!/#2!@# &$@: ** _ richie just texted me this. come get yr fucking boy eddie _

There’s a screenshot and sure enough, Richie’s name (in Bev’s phone, he’s under  **ugly fucker** ) and photo (a pretty flattering one, actually, seeing as Eddie recalls his photo in Beverly’s phone being mostly of his nostril. Maybe Richie does look ugly in the photo. Maybe Eddie’s biased) are up at the very top of it. There’s a text, which Beverly hasn’t replied to, and it reads:  _ bev. im gna marry this kid one day. no word of a lie. _

Eddie pauses to read it five, ten, fifteen more times. Then he taps on Richie’s shoulder and tilts the phone in his direction.

“Did you say this?” Eddie asks, ignoring the way his voice pitches itself. Richie glances over nonchalantly, reads over the text, and smiles mostly to himself.

“I did.”

“Oh. Okay.”

_ i think my insides just fell out of my ass beverly _

It doesn’t occur to Eddie just now that marriage means  _ love _ . Richie loves him.

  
  
  


It takes Richie a  _ while _ to let Eddie understand the full scope of it all, of the truth behind everything he’s done for the past couple months. Eddie figures he’d needed to build a different kind of trust. The one they have now, maybe. He doesn’t know why Richie takes so long, really, but he isn’t mad. He could never be.

“Uh, Eddie,” is how he starts it, which is fine, because the cold, calculated tone of it catches Eddie’s attention. They’re two weeks into whatever this is now, the on-and-off kissing and flirting and baring their souls and their feelings every chance they get mingled with hanging out in Richie’s room to do nothing when his parents aren’t home. They’re in the garage, which is sweltering, and both of them are sweaty, but they’re waiting for Mike to call and let them know to come on down to Bill’s house. But nonetheless, Eddie snaps his head up from staring down at his feet and looks to Richie, who stares at nothing in particular with his brows knit closely together.

“Yeah, Rich?” Eddie says. He pushes off the side of Richie’s car, which is where he leans, and moves to stand in front of him. The way Richie’s mouth hangs open just a little, like he’s searching for words he doesn’t have, makes Eddie feel like it’s the right thing to do when he steps a little closer.

“The fighting,” Richie says. His eyes dart upwards like he’s attempting to recall exactly what it is he’s talking about. He swallows hard. “The bloody noses and the bruises, whatever, some of that was real. Like, I want you to know that, first and foremost. I really did get my fuckin’ stomach stomped on in the road that one time because I’m a reckless idiot, that was real, but a lot of it… I don’t know. I wanted you to think I was cool, or that I was good enough to defend myself even if I walked away with a couple of cuts and scrapes every time. And you didn’t. It didn’t work. Which is fine, and not your fault. Because I could’ve just told you. You know about the college applications and the mail and everything, so you could’ve just known the rest of what really happened. I should’ve told you. That night in the car, I should’ve just said it.” Eddie tilts his head, just missing Richie’s point. Richie swallows again. “I never went to parties that often. I don’t really like them. I usually just stay home.”

“Richie,” is all Eddie can say. And he keeps saying it. Over and over and over until he thinks his lungs might collapse from speaking so much without taking a breath in between.

“And now you know,” Richie says with another shrug. Eddie thinks about the bloody tissue again and he really wants to throw up this time. “You know other things, too, obviously, all the stuff I wanted you to know. About me liking you and all that. But you know this now, and this is something I think you  _ need _ to know. Because we’re friends first. Or we were. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I asked if you would stay, if you would skip out on college to stay with me, and I get it now, you can’t. It was selfish of me to ask that of you. But that’s why I did.”

“Richie, you’re not selfish. I’d never think you were selfish.”  _ Don’t you see that? Especially now. _

“But it’s okay if you  _ do _ think I was,” Richie says, his eyes urgent and pleading, like he wants Eddie to just throw the blame on him (the blame for what, exactly? The blame for needing someone to lean on? Since when was it a crime to depend on someone a little bit?) but Eddie isn’t buying into it. “It’s okay, really. Because I  _ was _ .”

“You weren’t. And it doesn’t matter now.” Eddie makes a split second decision. For the first time in his life, he makes a choice for himself on the spot because he  _ can _ , and a spark of pride in himself does light up in his head, if just for a moment. “Because it’s either I’m staying here, or I’m going and you’re coming with me.”

Richie gapes at him. “Coming with you?”

“Coming with me. Like you said. We can get an apartment, a place to live. And you can bring Delilah. That’s what you wanted, right? That’s what you said.”

Richie thinks for a moment, but he doesn’t appear unsure. He seems to be trying to decipher whether this is real or fake. Eddie helps him along. “Richie, I’m serious. Do you wanna do that? Do you wanna come live with me?”

Richie’s eyes land on Eddie, soft and wide and kind to the highest degree that Eddie’s ever seen them. He can’t believe he’d ever thought things between them could grow icy if the truth came out. Their friendship, the foundation for everything else that they may or may not be, has only gotten better and stronger with each passing day.

“Yeah, Eds. I do,” Richie says.

“Okay.” Eddie grins then, his eyes prickling with something warm and sharp with emotion. He won’t admit that they’re tears. Richie takes both of his hands into his, which are warm and gentle, barely there in the way his fingers slip between Eddie’s. “Get yourself a job, then, once we get there. One that you’ll  _ keep _ \--” Richie laughs at this, a real laugh -- “and I will, too. And we’ll get the money. We’ll make it work.”

“We’ll make it work,” Richie repeats. He makes the words sound like a foreign language. Eddie expects that Richie hasn’t grown accustomed to making things  _ work. _ Things change, though. 

  
  


There’s this grocery store up the street from Richie’s house. A five minute walk at the most, and it’s got air conditioning and a shit ton of food, of course, at super cheap prices, which has always confused Eddie because Richie lives in one of (if not  _ the _ ) richest neighbourhoods in Derry. He and Richie walk there one day. They’d been selected by Beverly to get Bill a cake for his birthday, and while Richie can cook pretty all right, he can’t bake for shit, and Eddie barely knows how to turn on an oven, so store-bought is the only option.

“Ben’s been assigned decorating duty, from what I understand,” Richie says. “Which I just don’t get. The party is at Bill’s house. Why doesn’t Bill do it?”

“Because it’s his birthday, you idiot.”

“Oh, whatever. I hate it when you make good points.” Eddie grins. “What should we put on the cake? Can we have it say ‘happy birthday cocksucker’ or would he have a heterosexual aneurysm at the sheer thought of such a homoerotic act?”

Eddie’s laugh carries for miles in every direction, he’s sure of it. “I think we should do that. He’d appreciate it, right? He’s got a sense of humor. And you only turn eighteen once, so you might as well get insulted by your closest friends while you’re at it.”

“I’ve taught you so well,” Richie says, faking a dreamy sigh that makes Eddie giggle as he shoulders open the door of the grocery store. “Okay. I’ll get the cake so that you don’t have the get all embarrassed about saying the word cocksucker in public, you go get some snacks or something. I don’t know. Something we can eat on the way there.”

“Gotcha,” Eddie says, and for a second he thinks about leaning up to kiss Richie quickly before they head in their own separate directions, and it seems Richie has the same idea, but Eddie pulls away. He smiles at Richie, timid now, and shuffles in the direction of the endless maze of aisles.

He ends up getting lost.

He doesn’t go to this grocery store. He’s never actually even been grocery shopping before, if he’s totally honest, because his mom would always go by herself so he wouldn’t be tempted by sugary snacks and drinks, but that’s kind of a humiliating thing to admit. He wanders aimlessly until he bumps into Richie.

“There you are. Empty-handed,” Richie says. “Too many options?”

“Something like that.”

Richie smiles a sweet smile, one that reads as understanding and genuine, like all of Richie’s smiles are. “I’m a connoisseur, lucky for you. Hold the cake,” Richie says, and Eddie takes it from Richie’s hands and holds it like a life preserver, grateful that Richie had glossed over Eddie’s obvious confusion. When Eddie looks up, Richie’s disappeared completely into the mass of shelves and aisles.

Eddie does the only thing he can think to do in a situation where a grown man is lost in a grocery store, and he starts walking like he knows where the fuck he’s going.

Only when he passes by a group of young kids with their mother does he remember that Bill’s cake says  _ happy birthday cocksucker! _ in bright red frosting on the top. He avoids eye contact and keeps moving.

Richie’s voice carries him into an aisle marked #27. There’s a girl there with him.

She’s short, shorter than Eddie, just barely up to Richie’s chest, and she’s got this cute deep red hair that falls just under her chin with bangs that make her face look round and soft around the edges. She’s smiling at Richie. Eddie wonders if he knows her.

“Thank you, but - I, uh, I have a boyfriend,” Richie is saying to the girl. It takes Eddie a minute to recognize that Richie’s  _ boyfriend _ is him, that it’s not some other guy that he needs to be jealous of, and he blushes a deep red. The girl steps back and Eddie hears her hushed apology before she catches his eye from where he stands at the opposite end of the aisle. She offers him a shy smile, and Eddie wonders if she figures it’s him that Richie is talking about or if she gathers that he’s just some weird guy watching her flirt with this tall kid. She scampers off, clearly embarrassed, but Eddie forgets all about her when Richie turns to look at him. 

“Spying on me?” he teases, venturing a step towards Eddie.

“Boyfriend?” Eddie teases back, taking a few steps forward into Richie’s arms. They are still in public in Derry and someone is most definitely going to see them, but Richie doesn’t really seem to mind. Richie kisses him lightly on the lips, kind of messy and a little bit gross and Eddie is thinking that his mother would go insane if she caught wind of this. So he rises up on his toes and kisses Richie back harder. Bill’s cake is wedged in between them, the plastic cover over it digging into both of their chests.

“You don’t want that? To be mine?” Richie murmurs. Eddie is so painfully aware that there are people passing by either side of the aisle looking at them, looking at Richie with his arms slung over Eddie’s shoulders and their faces so close together - in the middle of a grocery store, for Christ’s sake - but Richie appears unaffected. 

Eddie shakes his head. “No, I do. So fucking bad. Just wish that fourteen-year-old girl hadn’t known that we’re official before I did.” 

“Hey, watch it. She was at least fifteen.”

“Oh, well if you know so much about her, why don’t you just go and chase after her-”

“Shut up,” Richie blurts out in a breathy laugh, and Eddie freezes in the middle of his sentence. “You’re so weird. I think that’s why we work.”

Eddie lets out a laugh as well, too caught up in Richie’s words to really care that he’s poking fun at him. He grins at Richie, watches Richie watch him with hungry, happy eyes for a few seconds before a reply comes to him, brutal in the kindest way in its honesty. “I think so, too,” he says. He kisses Richie’s cheek softly, raising one hand to hold the other side of Richie’s face in it, and then he plops his feet flat on the ground again. Richie pouts at him. 

“Chips,” Eddie says, and Richie considers for a moment before he nods and twists himself only from the waist up to look at the wall of flavored potato chips behind them.

Richie and Eddie had gone to Bill’s house every single day during the final week of summer, the week just before all seven of them are going to jet off to college one by one by one by… two. Bill’s birthday falls on the very last day of said final week - the day before residing in Derry comes to an end for all of them. It also happens to be the hottest day of the entire fucking summer. So they walk the cake to his house in the heat, because Richie says that he wants to save the gas in the car for when they leave so that they don’t have to fill the tank up halfway out of Derry, and because they’re also just complete fucking idiots who don’t understand that things can melt when it’s hot outside. But it’s whatever. Bill won’t care.

And then there’s this  _ thing _ , which Eddie knows now has a brand spanking new name attached to it now. He and Richie are… a couple. Not really dating, necessarily, though their incessant trips to the diner and to the store together and on kinda-gross-because-it’s-way-too-humid walks every once in a while might constitute as dates. Eddie likes saying that they’re  _ together _ . Richie had called them an item once - someday earlier that week when it was way too late at night for them to still be up talking but they  _ were _ \- because he’d said it reminded him of when they were twelve and they’d see headlines in magazines with neon color schemes about irrelevant teenage celebrities who might be dating. “We’re them,” Richie’d said. “We’re the two Disney stars who kissed once on their show and are now an  _ item _ .”

Turns out Richie’s the one to bring up a pretty crucial detail while they’re walking with a vulgarly frosted half-melted cake. This being: they haven’t told anybody.

Well, Beverly knows a few fragments. She knows they’re a thing, and she knows that Richie’s  _ gonna marry this kid one day, no word of a lie  _ (Eddie’s heart hammers in his chest at such a remarkable speed whenever he thinks about that text that sometimes he thinks he might collapse. He can’t wait for the day he gets to tell his kids - their kids, maybe, but Eddie doesn’t want to think about that right now - that he’d fallen in love with a boy who’d felt so much for him that he’d wanted to  _ marry  _ him.  _ God. _ ) but she doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know about the official label (and considering that it had  _ just _ happened, that’s pretty fair), which is huge, and she doesn’t know about the apartment, which is… monumental.

Richie decides to break it to everyone at once. Eddie agrees completely when he suggests this. He’s expecting a nice, pleasant, calm announcement, but then at some point he remembers that he’s in love with Richie Tozier and nothing he ever does is nice, pleasant, and calm. It’s ridiculous. It’s spontaneous as hell. Eddie loves it.

He sits on Bill’s bed with his legs crossed and Richie’s hand on his thigh.  _ Shouldn’t that be enough? That’s enough, right? _ It’s not enough. Richie leans into him to whisper something, and Eddie gets chills just from the sheer proximity of Richie’s mouth to the shell of his ear, chills that Richie feels under his palm. He laughs softly before he says, “Maybe we should just make out. Get the point across ASAP.”

Eddie pushes him away with his shoulder, rolling his eyes and hating that he blushes at the suggestion. “Gross,” he says. “No. Do it right.”

“Would it be romantic of me to say that anything is right if I do it with you?”

“ _ Yes _ , but I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Anything is right if I d-”

“Shut the fuck  _ up _ .”

“Jesus, fine. You’re ugly and gross and I don’t have any big gay feelings towards you whatsoever. Better?”

“Sounds much closer to what I thought you were thinking for six years straight. Ha.”

“That’s terrible, Eddie.”

“You’re terrible for not making out with me, like, four years ago or something.”

“I didn’t even like you four years ago. I didn’t even like  _ guys _ four years ago.”

“Really? Because I recall you really wanting a certain Star Wars character’s dick up your-”

“What the fuck are the two of you talking about right now?” Stan interrupts, staring at them with a critical, terribly confused squint.

Richie coughs and snatches his hand off of Eddie’s thigh. Eddie puts his own hand there to replace the lost contact, pouting a little. “We are talking about… something that we want to tell everyone.”  _ Okay, that’s not so bad. Easy segue. _

The room is fairly quiet already, so the five of their friends just kind of… look at them. The both of them. And they wait. Beverly has a sweet smile painted on her face to match the knowing glint in her eye, and Eddie smiles back at her before he reminds himself to be focused on Richie right now. Everybody knows Eddie’s gay, and everybody’s known that since forever, but Richie’s going to be telling everyone more than one thing when he says that he and Eddie are an  _ item _ .

“So,” Richie says. He clears his throat and licks his lips and runs a hand through his hair. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Long story short, Eddie’s going to college. Which I know he didn’t tell anyone besides me, because he wants it to be a secret, everything about it. So his mom doesn’t find out where he’s going and all that. I’m not going to college. But I am going… with Eddie. To his college. Or, well, to an apartment nearby. An apartment that we’re gonna share with my dog, Delilah.”

When Richie goes silent for a moment, Bill jumps in with, “Is that all? Th-that’s cool. Congrats on college, Eddie. I’m r-really proud of you.”

“Thanks,” Eddie murmurs shyly.

“That’s not all, actually,” Richie says, and there’s a little jump in his voice, a shakiness that prepares Eddie instantly to jump in and patch up every mistake that Richie might make as he continues. “Another thing is-- there’s this  _ thing _ . This thing where Eddie and I -- I think about Eddie all the time in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. Which sounds super weird, I know, but he knows what I mean. Eddie knows. And I found out fairly recently that Eddie also thinks about me in the same ways for the same reasons. And we started doing what people always do. With their… mouths.”

Eddie catches a glimpse of their friends’ faces. Nobody knows what the fuck Richie is on about - not even Beverly. Her head is tilted, and her eyebrows are knitted close together, and the rest of them share the same blank stare. So Eddie intervenes.

“I’m really in love with Richie and I have been for a long time, which you all apparently know very well because I guess I wasn’t very subtle about it. And Richie, he… liked me. Likes me. He likes me. So we’re together. Like, a real couple. Kissing and kinda-sorta dates and whatever else. That’s all we’re trying to say.”

Richie speaks before anyone else gets a chance to react. “You’re fucking in  _ love _ with me?”

Eddie freezes. “I, uh - yes.”

Richie stares at him for a second, and this unbelievable smile stretches across his lips. It’s the best thing Eddie’s ever seen. “Me, too.”

“What?” Eddie says. He’d gotten it the first time. He just wants to hear it. The full thing. On loop and playing in the background as the soundtrack for the rest of his life.

“I’m in love with you, too.”

“Oh,” Eddie whispers, and he returns the smile, and it feels like that’s the only thing in the entire world happening in this present moment until Stan speaks.

“I was gonna make fun of you guys for thinking we didn’t all know this was gonna happen someday, but that was pretty sweet, so. Congratulations.”

And it just sort of happens like that. When they’re on their way out and Eddie is caught up listening to a quick story Ben is telling, he overhears Richie saying something to Bill that sounds like “Sorry for making your party about us” and Bill says something like “Nah, it’s cool. You guys are g-good together” to which Richie responds “I know. Pretty sure he’s it for me.” Eddie’s stomach flips and he has to cover his mouth while he finishes listening to Ben just to hide the grin that brightens up his whole face.

Richie wraps his arms around Eddie from behind and rests his head on top of Eddie’s. Ben finishes his story, and Stan laughs a little too much for reasons nobody’s quite sure of, and for the very last time, all of them leave Bill’s house together and walk in separate directions.

“I’m it for you?” Eddie blurts halfway through their comfortably silent trek to Eddie’s house, because he can’t fucking help it. The sun is setting, and everything’s orange around them, glowing almost as much as Eddie must be right now. “You really think that?”

Richie blushes. “I wish you wouldn’t hear me when I say shit like that.”

“Did you really mean it?”

Richie nods, and without hesitating he says, “Yeah, I fucking meant it, Eddie. Of course I did.”

Eddie knows it’s a risky move, because his driveway is in sight and the next door neighbours’ kids are playing with a sprinkler in the front yard, but he stops in his tracks and grabs Richie’s face and kisses him. For a long, long time. He kisses Richie until he gets a little dizzy and sees stars behind his eyes.

And then he pulls away and he says, “I can’t believe you love me.”

And Richie says, “You better start.”

  
  
  


Bev leaves first. Eddie hates it. He hates to have to say goodbye to her, and when he has to, when the moment and its weight finally punch him right in the gut, he does it with eyes brimming with tears and a heavy heart. He tells Beverly to text him every day. She promises she will.

Bill leaves not long after. Richie calls him a dozen or so names before he tacks on some cheesy loving friendship crap at the end, and the sight of them hugging so tightly makes Eddie smile.

When Mike goes, Eddie cries again. Richie does too. They both pretend that they don’t. Mike tells them it’s okay if they do cry, but not to worry because he’s only a few hours or a phone call away.

Stan cries after Mike is gone, and before they know it, Stan’s left. Eddie doesn’t get to say goodbye to Stan, because he leaves without telling anybody what time he’s going at to avoid those goodbyes, but Eddie takes great solace in the fact that his last text to Stan, sent the night before he left, was  _ love u. see u tmrw. _

When Ben goes, Richie absolutely loses it. Eddie has to tell him to calm down several times because it just gets a bit embarrassing, having him blubber on and on about  _ please call us, Ben, don’t forget to call us, okay? _ Really, though, Eddie cries too.

Then there’s Richie and Eddie. Richie packs Eddie’s bags before he packs his own. He says that’s what good boyfriends do, but Eddie will insist until the day he lays on his deathbed that Richie’s just a sentimental motherfucker and wanted to linger in Eddie’s room, a home for so many memories, for as long as possible. He kisses Eddie a hundred times when they’re on their way out of Derry, like he’s saying goodbye to Eddie, but they both know that isn’t and is never going to happen. There’s this stretch of adulthood out in front of them now. This endless expanse of freedom, and all these shitty responsibilities tacked on, but what’s truly liberating is that everything that happens with them, individually and together, for the rest of their lives… none of it happens in Derry. Not one single thing. They’re out. Reality’s a bitch, but they cling to that fact. It’s all they’ve got. So there’s all this happy, Derry-less space in their lives from this day forward to fill up, and they aren’t quite sure what to do with it or where to begin or how to make things work or them.

So what do they do?

They jump.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH MY GOOOOOODDDDD ok im sure u can see why this took me a hot minute to write....literally 13k words can u believe that. rlly went all out for the last chapter as u can see.
> 
> big shoutout and all the thanks to chloe & my new friend dylan for reading this fic and hyping me up all the time....i possess so much love for u both and i blush every time u compliment my work even if it's just like a single line that made u giggle or whatever. i love u.
> 
> and that goes for everyone else who has read, left kudos, commented, bookmarked, whatever!!! u make me happy and i love u a lot. pls leave me a comment if u have the time bc it'd make my day or whateva and i really appreciate even the shortest ones it's just so nice to see & it warms my heart!!!! 
> 
> anyway mushy shit aside. overall i am really proud of this - both this particular chapter and the fic as a whole - so thank u for reading it. it means the world to me to know that even just one or two people enjoy my work. i hope u all do. i'm kinda repeating myself at this point so thank u and goodbye <3 all the love


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